Star Fox: Mercenaries
by Irish Redd
Summary: A mercenary's life is hard, thankless, and lonely. But let a man taste that freedom, and he's like to never part with it. So when war threatens Lylat's fragile peace, Fox must fly with friends old and new to protect all that he holds dear. Post SF64.
1. Chapter 1: A Day in the Life

**I: **_A Day in the Life_

Meteos.

A chaotic and inconsistent assemblage of rock and natural metals, tumbling through space in a semi-organized belt that runs through the Lylat System like a river. Massive clumps of raw material populate this tremendous expanse, joining their smaller cousins in a gravitational entrapment around Solar, doomed to forever encircle the star. On rare occasions, an errant meteor may apparently spontaneously break free of the snare, hurtling one way or another to a fate unknown, but for the most part, it is a fairly tame system anomaly.

Intense, century long mining and assimilation has left portions of the field strangely barren and empty, with depleted asteroids floating lazily through the small gaps in the belt, unused fragments left behind by the miners. These 'dead zones' are often uncharted and usually avoided by the vast majority of Lylat's population; some say it's due the navigational hazards that always seem to pervade these areas, while others sidestep them due to supposed pirate activity. Some even claim that the abandoned mining machinery that was left when the miners moved on gives off an eerie, almost subliminal uneasiness.

Whatever the reason, these isolated holes, deep within Meteos, are largely left alone by both civilian and law enforcement traffic alike. This lack of supervision makes the openings in the belt all the more attractive to those whose trades are often looked down upon by the rest of the civilized world. Such unsavory types flock to these regions in droves, seeking shelter within their empty expanses, building colonies for themselves within the very asteroids that make up the belt. The colossal honeycombed rocks are inhabited with every possible kind of criminal and fugitive a government could ever hope to put a warrant out for; running the gambit from petty thieves to mass-murderers; hitmen for hire to corrupt business owners.

And of course; mercenaries.

* * *

The soft, azure glow of cockpit instruments bathed Fox McCloud's rusty orange and white visage in an unearthly luminosity, one that broke the otherwise dark shade created by a mammoth of a boulder off in the distance, completely blocking Solar's rays and throwing those in its wide wake into shadow. Sighing, the vulpine released the joystick he had been lazily gripping and reached once more for his fighter's sensory controls, tapping a series of digital keys and getting the same result as the last five times he checked the radar out of tedium: empty. 

'…_Who knew babysittin' a convoy could be so boring,' _he thought, watching as a trio of long, cylindrical transports idled along at a leisurely rate ahead of him, their engine blocks giving off a trail of orange and red particles as they propelled the freighters at their top speed, appearing though as if they were barely moving at all to the Arwing pilot. At the front of the single-file vessels was another, smaller propulsion trail, one he easily recognized to belong to his wingmate. His partner's impatience was plainly visible to Fox, even from the opposite end of the convoy; his identical blue and white, swept-wing fighter was drifting back and forth above the lead transport like a level pendulum.

A gentle pulsing sound abruptly filled the cockpit, coupling with a blinking indicator on his control panel in signaling the reception of a communications request, something that Fox welcomed as a respite from the monotony. He instantly recognized the sender on the text alert that also popped up on his display and cleared the long-distance call, straightening himself in his padded seat as he did so; the mercenary knew the sender of the request had a penchant for being slightly overbearing about such trivial things.

Folding from nothing in the bottom left portion of the vulpine's Heads Up Display, a moving picture appeared; filled with static at first, but quickly clearing to merely slightly disrupted. The speech of a middle-aged hare, easily a couple decades the fox's senior, filled the pilot's compartment; the gold outline surrounding his portrait on the HUD identifying the com channel as private.

"Fox, can y…hear me?" Peppy asked, a burst of interference interrupting him for a moment midway through the transmission. Past the hare's face, the fox could see the background of the bridge of their mercenary team's home and carrier, the _Great Fox_.

"Yeah Peppy," Fox replied, glancing out again at the glimmering transport engine castoff, "But you're breakin' up a bit."

"Ah; it must…the asteroid field," the response came, continuing to flicker in quality, "Anyway; if things…still going according to the brief…, you should be entering…Briar Pocket soon."

"Affirmative Pep; the radar's sayin' the rocks are starting to thin out up ahead."

"Alright, pay attention then Fox," the elder continued, catching a stretch of unfettered com time before the static reappeared, "According to…contractor, their rivals are planning…small-scale raid on one…their convoys. They said…most of their activity….at the site of…former Briar Mining Station; …on your toes."

"Roger that," the vulpine answered, nodding, "I'll relay that to Falco too; thanks Peppy."

"Not a problem Fox; just…careful though, okay? I've got the _Great_…out on…Cornerian edge of the field. Our respon…time if something…wrong will be close to…hour."

"I'm aware of that," he replied, smiling, "But don't sweat it; me 'n Falco can handle a squad of whatever these guy'll throw at us blindfolded. They'd just be some mid-sizedsmuggler company's enforcers anyway, right?"

"Ye…, in a rather precise manner of speak...," Peppy laughed, his portrait continuing to bend and distort randomly on occasion as he gradually became serious again, "One m… thing though; remember to check with me for confirmation…payment _before_ leaving the destination Freeport. They may've hired us…protection from criminals, but they're still smugglers themselves."

"Got it Peppy," Fox said in a finishing manner, placing a hand back on the joystick as he visually noticed the space between asteroids becoming larger and larger, "We're just now entering Briar Pocket; the Freeport should be on the other side."

"Understood; good lu… then. We'll expect you back in a f… hours. Pep… out." The portrait of the hare folded into itself and disappeared after he signed off, and the vulpine's cockpit fell silent once more.

Looming up ahead of the column of transports, the orange furred fox noticed a particularly large mass of metal and rock, clumped together in a very rough vertical oblong shape and sitting directly in their flight path. Several pieces of errant and forgotten mining equipment jutted out from the enormous asteroid, as well as many of its neighbors, letting the vulpine know that they had reached the extreme edge of the Pocket. Beyond the massive obstruction that the lead freighter of the convoy had just reached and was working its way around, Fox observed a significant expanse of emptiness; several tiny fragments of meteor material and old machinery floated through the hole in the asteroid field, but none were on the same scale of what he, his partner, and his charges had been flying past for the last hour or so.

Pulling back on the throttle, and feeling the slight force as small retro-boosters slowed his Arwing down accordingly, he still maintained enough velocity to gain ground on the slow and awkwardly proceeding transports as they attempted to guide their long hulls around the offending asteroid. He approached and soared past the rear freighter, watching it retreat beneath his cockpit as he skimmed its smooth dorsal surface, the hull plating and panels rushing past him before he ascended a little to avoid surprising the pilot of the cargo vessel in the bridge up front.

By the time he could repeat a similar maneuver with the second transport in line, the lead ship had already completed the semi-circular navigation of the asteroid, and was pausing on the other side of it to wait for its companions to follow a similar path around. Floating patiently above the first freighter, and turned to face out across the expanse they were about to enter, was Fox's wingman, and the reason for the vulpine's moving up in the convoy.

He keyed in a com request to his friend, intending to inform him that they were to switch roles again; his wingmate would take the fox's old position in the back, and he would take his wingman's place up front. On the longer escort contracts, such as their current assignment, keeping a pilot in the same place for the entire time only results in unintentional boredom and laziness, leaving the potential for missing something important higher with every passing minute. So, in order to allay these dangers, the escorts usually didn't stay in the same spot along the convoy for too long, and traded formation positions to mix things up a bit.

However, for Fox, the seconds stretched into minutes after he sent the communications notice, and still his wingmate didn't answer. Finally, just as the last freighter was completing its journey around the obstacle, and they were regrouping to continue their journey, the familiar message window appeared in the bottom left of his HUD, and the sound came soon after.

"Hey, sorry 'bout that Fox," the blue-hued avian said, the blare of heavy metal playing alongside his voice and filling the leader's cockpit with the trademark percussion and guitar riffs, "What's up?"

"We're switchin' again, Falco," he replied, easing up parallel to the second Arwing and glancing at his buddy though the durable canopies, "Take up position behind the last transport."

"Gotcha, McCloud," the second pilot answered, boosting his fighter from a stand-still and making his way across Fox's vision as he turned in a wide curve to head to the rear of the convoy. As he did though, his gales of laughter could be heard over the com, along with the sight of his mirthful face. "Hey Fox, check it out," he chuckled, prompting the merc leader to quickly switch the com frequency to private; his friend had a way of making the most inappropriate comments at times, "These guys can't even pilot a friggin' freighter right; it's takin' 'em an _hour _to get the past that boulder. No wonder they need protection."

Fox grinned and took a sideways glance at the time on a digital display; it had only been a few minutes, "Yeah...but listen up Falc; we're about to enter the Briar Pocket. According to the gunrunners we're escortin', this is where their harassers are most likely gonna make an appearance; the leftover com interference from the old mining stuff'll screw a bit with communications and sensors, so stay sharp."

"You know me, El Cap-i-tan," he replied, using the proper title for the fox in his usual casual tone, "The day I go dull is the day I die."

"Good to hear buddy," Fox responded, still grinning despite the semi-serious nature of the information he was relaying, "The Riley Freeport is just beyond the pocket; once we make it there, the port's security will take over."

"Then all we have to do is get paid, right?"

"Right, although that's easier said then done with these kinds of guys," he answered, taking up his new position just above the lead transport.

"True," Falco replied, assuming _his _new role at the rear of the convoy, and accelerating in unison with the transports as they finally began to make their way across the Pocket, "So why didn't we ask for payment in advance, again?"

"Eh, Peppy tried; but nobody would trust us with that. Keep in mind man; we're not exactly infamous mercenaries. Heh, not _yet _anyways."

"Huh," the avian grunted, inspecting the nails of his free hand while the other was slack on the stick, "You'd think people would at least say 'thank you' or somethin'when we go and single-handedly save the entire system from a mad scientist, ya know?"

"Well that's just kinda the cost of our business Falco; you didn't think General Pepper was really going to publicly acknowledge the fact that four mercs showed up the entire Cornerian Army last year, did you?"

"Yeah…," he nodded in agreement reluctantly, staring at the now speeding transports ahead of him as he accelerated to maintain formation. The shear openness of the Briar Pocket permitted the normally lumbering cargo vessels to fully utilize the powerful industrial engines they were equipped with, allowing them to move along at a surprising clip.

"Anyway, our contract's almost done; just try n' stay awake 'till we get to Riley, okay?"

"I'll do my best, sir," he retorted with a wide grin, again using the vulpine's official title in a sarcastic manner and adding to the running joke with a snap of a salute.

Fox laughed and cut the transmission, shaking his head a bit with a smile still plastered to his face as he turned his gaze to the immediate region of the Pocket they were traversing. He could see the larger asteroids and chunks of leftover mining equipment far off in the distance, forming the border of the abandoned sector with a ring of alike landmarks. Tiny particles and clusters of dust and minerals bumped and buffeted his fighter's shields as the quintet of spacecraft cruised along, causing no measurable effect other than the occasional 'thump' as a mini meteor impacted the energy protection.

Tapping a touch-key on a panel to the side of him, he brought up a map of the Lylat System in the bottom right corner of his HUD, and a few keystrokes later, the navigational chart was zoomed in on the Meteos asteroid belt. A couple seconds of signal searching later, a blinking yellow arrow appeared in the middle of the field, indicating his present location and coordinates. Fox decreased the displayed contents further until he was left with a relatively limited map of his direct surroundings, one that indicated his position as just crossing the quarter-way point of the recently charted Briar Pocket. _'So far, so good,' _he couldn't stop himself from thinking as the golden icon continued to move at a snail's pace across the mini-map.

Then, as if someone had been reading his mind, a com window abruptly appeared adjacent to the map on the left side of his display, unfolding to reveal a brownish cougar, his clothes bearing the rough and unkempt look that if nothing else, firmly identified him as a smuggler.

"Alright ya mercs," he began gruffly, the wording of his announcement making it clear to the vulpine that he was addressing both himself and Falco over the com, "I'm gettin' several signals on scope up ahead between us and the Freeport; looks mostly like smaller fighters, bombers maybe. We're already late for the shipment though, so we're just gonna go ahead an' plow right through 'em. Make sure you keep 'em off us if you wanna earn your pay."

"Roger that Lead," Fox replied to the head freighter pilot, "See what you n' your boys can do about getting' into a defensive position though; I wouldn't recommend charging bombers in single file like that. If they take the first one of you out, the others behind ya will-"

"Hey; did I ask for yur opinion, rodent?" the smuggler pilot angrily cut him off, "I'm payin' you two fer security, not for advice on how to do my job."

"Er, right," he stuttered, a level of surprise at the rude rebuttal evident in the slightly folded ears and raised eyebrows of the vulpine, "My apologies, sir."

The smuggler huffed once in annoyance and cut the connection. As he did though, Fox got a bit of satisfaction in the fact that according to the radar and what he could see of the repositioning first transport out his cockpit, the three cargo vessels were indeed heeding his advice and forming themselves into an upside-down triangle, with the trailing freighters pulling even with the lead.

At the same time on the radar, Fox also noticed a smaller blip making its way up to his own Arwing from the rear of the convoy, followed closely by the pilot of that fighter opening a private line of communications with him.

"What an ass, man," Falco remarked as he pulled even with the fox, "I swear, if we weren't getting' paid for this-"

"Then we wouldn't even be here in the first place," Fox interrupted, on a much friendlier level than the smuggler had him, "But don't worry 'bout it for now. Say what you want about a gunrunner's piloting or social skills, their intel always seems to be spot on. Let's go welcome our would-be assailants."

"Ah, you're probably right," the avian sighed contently, as if savoring something, "At least we finally get to do something _exciting _on this run." The background blare of rock music became a blast as he turned it up before temporarily terminating the com connection, boosting out ahead of the convoy with the vulpine in close pursuit, heading towards the radar signals that had just appeared on their Arwings' shorter sensor range.

As the pair of mercenaries approached the incoming and slightly distorted signals, a result of the residual electronic interference inherent within Meteos, they finally gained a small sliver of a visual on the targets, their reflective gray fighters catching Solar's rays and making their exact position clearly obvious to them. Adjusting to a slight correction in flight path, Fox and Falco were now charging directly at the offending group of ships as the latter thrusted eagerly towards the head-on confrontation.

The distance between the two sides melted as the mercs soared closer, reaching a point where the HUD sensors could identify the attackers as such with a series of crimson ID boxes; digital images that bracketed and followed the ships around the cockpit as they maneuvered in their formation, sprouting tiny lines of information as they did so. Using the information gained from this influx of data, and staring with a watchful eye at the rapidly decreasing distance gauge of the lead aggressor, Fox re-opened the channel with his wingman for a quick comment.

"Falco," he said, expecting and likewise able to ignore the vicious ambient soundtrack of the avian's cockpit, "Follow my lead."

Answering without word, opting only for a thumbs-up as his head nodded to the thumping beat of his music, Falco cut his velocity to assume position behind the vulpine and a bit to the side, giving them both a clear shot at the nearing fighters. The gap continued to drop at a frighteningly fast rate, drawing ever closer to the magic threshold of a number in which the space around them would explode in fire and munitions; a maelstrom of deadly weapons. And then, without further warning, they were there.

Fox tapped the afterburners even as his finger clenched around the stick trigger, his Arwing spouting fire from both sides as his thrusters flared up and his weapons sprang to life. His wingman mirrored his actions exactly, and soon two twin green laser streams were pouring into the approaching smuggler formation, while the more numerous fighters attempted to return fire. Under the withering onslaught of the vulpine and his cohort though, they couldn't maintain their positions and split up, just as the Arwings tore through the center of their former configuration at alarming speed.

Their objective of temporarily disrupting the assailant's charge to the vulnerable transports accomplished, Fox released the booster and yanked back on the joystick, pulling his highly maneuverable fighter into a U-turn. As he did so, he spoke over the constant com channel he had established with Falco, comparing what he saw on the first pass with the avian to form an impromptu attack plan.

"I got six of 'em," he called out, completing the turn and watching as the enemies attempted to readjust themselves from the apparently suicidal charge of the escorting Arwings.

"Two fighters and four bombers," Falco countered, following the vulpine out of the half-loop and targeting one of the slower, more heavily armed aggressors he had spied on the initial run by.

"Bombers are priority; take 'em out first if you can help it."

"Gotcha Fox."

The quartet of heavier assault craft had been able to reform since being thrown apart, and were bearing down upon the transports with all the thrust their engines could produce, nearing the range where their devastating armament could be unleashed. Ignoring the accompanying interceptors for the moment, the Arwings gave chase, using their superior speed to quickly catch up with the bombers.

Immediately as Fox's targeting crosshairs flashed red, he opened fire on a trailing heavy fighter, the laser bolts splashing against its shields as they absorbed the energy. The pilot of the bomber bobbed and juked back and forth, desperately trying to shake the vulpine's fire while still maintaining his attack course on the freighters. After another series of blasts though, the slower, bi-winged craft's shields buckled and fell, and he broke off again, pulling out and to the left as he abandoned his three companions in search of safety from the torrent of damage.

As the pilot did though, the lead mercenary peeled off the other three and tailed it closely, commanding his wingmate to stay on the remaining bombers as they closed in on the cargo vessels. With the shields down, the rogue heavy fighter was completely open to the carnage of Fox's blaster cannons, and it was all just a matter of leading the shots to the rapidly climbing ship. The vulpine tensed as his crosshairs sought the errant craft; the joystick pressed back as far as it would go as the Arwing gained ground in the diagonal loop the bomber was trying to perform.

In an instant, his dormant trigger finger released the pent up rigidity and squeezed the firing stud, triggering the release of dual streams of laser fire from beneath the nose of his fighter, leaping forth and tagging the unshielded chassis of his target. The scorching energy burrowed deep into the rear of the unfortunate bomber, one shot piercing the reactor and sending the craft up in an abrupt but impressive fireball.

"Scratch one!" Fox called over the com as he terminated the loop and re-entered the fray, only to get assaulted by a burst of gunfire from one of the interceptors, who had since caught up with the Arwings.

"Double that," Falco replied shortly thereafter, his message preceded by the flash and burst of another bomber being destroyed in the vulpine's peripheral. Just as he was saying it though, his portrait suddenly distorted and fizzled, an indicator that he had just been hit by something. "What the hell?" he exclaimed, reeling from the physical shock of the blasts and sending his fighter into an evasive roll, "Hey Fox! Need a little help here!"

"I'm a little busy right now," the fox replied, wincing both his eyes and ears as his own Arwing was hit again by another attack from the second enemy fighter, who was firmly attached to his tail, "Head for the freighters; we'll find a way to shake 'em."

On cue, the trio of transports stampeded into the fray, adding their multiple turrets to the already hectic battle of criss-crossing lasers and munitions as they strove to reach the relatively far safety of the destination Freeport. While their presence certainly helped the mercenaries, they themselves were also extremely vulnerable to the pair of remaining bombers, and the speed in which they charged only brought them into range sooner. And with their paid escorts occupied, they were open to attack.

As Fox boosted towards the freighters, hoping to lose his assailant with some maneuvering around the larger ships, he saw the bright flame of the thrust of several heavy missiles as the bombers launched their initial salvo and peeled off. He watched the warheads home in on their unlucky target, forgetting for a moment the blasts rocking his shields from behind, transfixed on what he sure would be a massive explosion from the unprotected cargo vessel. He wasn't disappointed.

The torpedoes impacted the right freighter in the formation almost exactly mid-way down the ship's 'spine', detonating in a series of flare-bangs as they unleashed their destructive fury. Then, in a stunning and startling outburst, the transport literally erupted from within as the munitions cargo it was hauling blasted a hole clean through the long, thin ship, splitting the vessel in two as the weapons onboard continued to bake and ignite, further consuming the disabled freighter until only debris remained. The surviving two transports were able to drive the bombers off from another run, but the damage had been done.

"Damnit!" Falco cried over the com, watching the burnt and twisted wreckage continue to drift apart as he soared by, his pursuer following closely, "There goes our paycheck, man!"

"Keep fightin' Falco," Fox replied frantically, swerving to avoid more gunfire, "We're still good for two-thirds of the contract at least."

His wingmate grunted in reply, and the vulpine got back to more pressing issues in the form of trying to lose the interceptor on his back while at the same time angling towards the bombers to prevent a second attack from occurring. In the time since their first run, the heavier assault fighters had been able to loop around in preparation for another bombardment of the transports from the rear, something Fox was intending to interrupt.

Kicking his Arwing up on its port wing, the vulpine faked in the same direction for a moment, leading his trailer to begin to turn left with him, before completing the trick and gunning his thruster straight ahead, using the few extra seconds while the pursuer recovered to increase the gap between them. He darted past the freighters as they continued to spew long, slow moving plasma bolts from their turrets in a desperate attempt to hit one of the attackers, missing much more often than not as even the more sluggish bombers could evade the fire fairly easily.

Returning his fighter to a level position as he approached the remaining, charging heavy fighters, Fox flicked a tab on his joystick, and a mechanical whirr let him know that the onboard missiles were prepped for launch. His targeting crosshairs turned into a box, and it began to glow orange as the computer attempted to lock onto one of the closing bombers; however, his boosters didn't allow the vulpine enough time to get a full lock, forcing him to deploy the lightweight, maneuverable missiles without a stable target.

His blue and white vessel's incredible speed at the moment carried him to skim just over the assault ships as one of his anti-fighter warheads detonated, noticing a split-second before the blast that the bomber had just begun to launch _its _payload. The resulting compound explosion of the torpedo blowing up midway out its magazine and consuming the fighter from within surprised even the battle-tested merc, the flare flashing on his face for a moment before it died down.

'_That leaves three,' _he though to himself as he pulled a quick U-turn to attempt to take out the last remaining bomber. However, when he completed the half-loop and set his sights on where he assumed the target to be, attacking the freighters, it was nowhere to be seen. A glance at his radar revealed that there was a blip retreating from his immediate area, a signal that, when put together with a visual by turning towards it, was revealed to be the bomber making a run for it, retreating the way it had come.

"Hey Fox!" Falco called over the com, "I think I lost my guy; he's not firin' any more."

A quick check of the area around the transports where the avian was weaving in and out, previously attempting to evade his pursuer, revealed the same instance with the bomber; the interceptor was withdrawing from the battlefield, following its heavier companion into the asteroid field and out of the openness of the Briar Pocket.

"Not quite Falco," he replied with a grin, knowing that what he was about to say would take some of the wind from his sails, "It seems like they're just pulling back."

"Eh, same difference," came the response, the raptor breathing deep in relief while at the same time trying to hid it from the camera that was capturing his image for the com portrait.

Fox opened his muzzle to continue, but a series of direct hits from the last interceptor's cannons stopped him dead in his verbal tracks in shock; he had completely forgotten about the fighter that had been harassing and taking potshots at him for the entire engagement. Now, despite the fact that his companions were leaving, the pilot of the stubborn craft was charging straight on, rocking Fox's Arwing with strike after strike until his speed shot him past vulpine, who was too stunned to immediately respond.

The vulpine quickly regained his senses though, growling in annoyance as he slammed his right foot-yoke, rotating his fighter vertical on the corresponding wing and turning to face the solo interceptor, watching as it mirrored his action to return for another headstrong rush. This time, Fox was ready for the pilot as he leveled out; as far as he was concerned at the moment, the assailant's light fighter was the only other ship in the pocket.

Florescent laserfire pierced the space between the two craft as they rapidly closed distance with each other, the Arwing laying waste to the jet-shaped fighter's shields and vice versa. Seeing the stalemate the charge would probably end up in, and hoping to take the enemy down on the current pass, Fox keyed a switch to double up his energy protection in front, leaving his engines and rear completely vulnerable, and flipped the tab on top of his joystick to its second setting, again arming the missiles he carried.

Bright red bolts of ultra-compressed energy continued to splash against the vulpine's reinforced shields as he once more forfeited the lock-on feature of the warheads for lack of time and launched them straight down the nose of the oncoming interceptor. Then, cringing slightly and inhaling a shallow breath, he jammed the afterburners at the same time his rockets tore down the attacker's shields, his Arwing lurching abruptly to breakneck speeds as he hurtled for an intentional head-on collision. He was gambling his life on his split-second plan; at the last possible second, he again kicked his ship up on its wing and angled down slightly, bracing for the incredible impact that would determine the victor of the virtual joust.

The smuggler fighter's pilot was caught completely off-guard by the fox's sudden increase in velocity, and had no time to react as their ships collided. Unshielded as the interceptor was, it stood little chance of winning the competition of kinetics as the Arwing literally plowed through it; Fox's now vertical wing, still protected by the form-hugging layer of absorbing energy, sliced clean through the assailant's vessel, severing its own right extension from the rest of the fighter and tearing out the thruster block behind the cockpit. Completely disabled and without any means of propulsion or power, the force of its own exploding engine shot what remained of the aggressor's fighter off away from the scene of battle, hurtling through the empty pocket and towards the opposite end as the pilot's retreating friends.

Gasping and suffering from tunnel vision and ears ringing so loud it felt as though he had been smacked in them, Fox slowed his Arwing and turned back around, glancing at the ruined fighter he had just rammed as it drifted away. A voice drifted in and out of existence, muffled to the point of mere grunts and sounds as the vulpine struggled to recover from his zoned out state of mind. Gradually, his clouded eyesight cleared and his hearing returned, leading him to finally realize the frenzy of sirens and flashing lights in his cockpit, the bold move having disrupted several systems. Besides the blaring warning sounds, there was also another noise that pervaded the small space; one that was accompanied by a picture surrounded in gold on his HUD.

"Fox!" the picture of Falco yelled again, further torturing his smarting eardrums, "Fox, answer me man! You alright!"

"…Yeah," he replied shakily, holding a tipless-gloved hand to the side of his muzzle as a sudden pain made itself known, "Yeah…I think so." He removed the paw from his cheek and stared at the three middle fingers of it, the rusty orange fur there matted and soaked with a thick crimson fluid. At the same time, he tasted the same metallic, coppery substance in his mouth; the pressure of his fingertips against his white but blood-stained muzzle forcing more of the liquid from the internal gash.

"You sure Foxie?" Falco asked, peering closer at his wingmates picture on the HUD, as if he could see better by doing so, "You're not lookin' so hot."

"No, it's…it's okay," he answered, manually checking his jawbone and wincing as his probing paw touched a bruised spot, "I-I'm okay."

"Well that was a hell of a stunt you pulled there, captain," the avian continued, grinning wide and splashing his voice with mirth, "Don't remember that move in the academy."

Fox laughed as much as his muzzle-wounds would allow, which wasn't more than a few soft chuckles, and began to converse again, but was cut off by a second com picture appearing above Falco's on his cockpit display. The alarms and strobing warning lights of his cockpit had faded away as they switched off, but he was about to be assaulted by another form of sensory attack; the lead gunrunner was back, and he didn't look too happy.

"Damnit mercs; you sellships are worthless!" the cougar spat, raging in his fury at the loss of one of his vessels, "That freighter contained something of extreme value to some very important people!"

"My apologies Lead," Fox replied, quickly losing his smile and assuming a deadly serious, if slightly exhausted, expression, "I'm sure that the pilot-"

"Screw the pilot!" the vulpine was cut off again, surprising and freezing his expression, "I can always hire a replacement. But the munitions onboard were more valuable than your pathetic lives will ever be worth!"

"Maybe you should've told us you were haulin' explosives then, smartass!" Falco cut in angrily, receiving the same messages as Fox was, as the cougar's broadcast was open to both of them, "Seriously; who charges a flight of bombers when they're shippin' _weapons_! You shoulda hung back and gave us some room to work before bustin' in on us and givin' those guys a clear shot!"

The gunrunner fumed silently for a moment after the interruption, stewing in his rage before answering, his voice growing louder and shriller with each sentence, "What we carry is not for you to know, merc. What our tactics are is not for you to care, merc! What we _decide _is not for you to _question, _merc! You understand that? _We _pay _you_, and you _obey_; that's how it works. I'll tell you right now; you'll be lucky to get your _lives _as payment, much less any cash."

"You're absolutely right Lead," Fox said quickly, hoping to appear apologetic and subservient, "And I apologize again for my wingman's remarks; they were out of line and he will be reprimanded for them."

"Hmph," the cougar grunted, his anger beginning to subside but still clearly visible in his face, "You'd best see to it that he is; now form up and let's get this over with."

His visage, contorted in barely suppressed resentment, disappeared with his com window as he cut the transmission, leaving only the members of the Star Fox team with their private channel. Falco turned his focus to his friend and superior in minor disgust, scorning him with his species' well-developed eyes.

"'Reprimanded'?" he asked as he and the physically battered vulpine took up their old positions at the front and rear of the shortened convoy, respectively, "What's with that?"

"Ah, sorry Falc," Fox replied with eyes shut, his mind still a little clouded from the collision with the smuggler's interceptor, "…But you gotta learn to be more…_diplomatic _with our employers, buddy."

"C'mon; you heard what he said," Falco argued, "He called us-"

"I know what he said, but it really doesn't matter," the merc captain continued, cutting off the avian, "He was right when he said that 'he pays us'; doesn't matter how disrespectful he is, he's the one who reports to the guy who signs the checks."

Falco sighed long and deep, his exhale easily picked up by the com mike, as he thought over what he was just told, "You're right man…like always." He smirked through his com portrait, noticing that Fox returned the expression before the raptor bowed his sight down for a moment and mellowed his mood, "I just hope whoever it was we're getting' paid by doesn't hold a grudge like this guy says he will."

"Yeah…me too."

Now trimmed down to four vessels, the convoy and its escorts continued their journey across the Briar Pocket without further interruption, re-entering the asteroid belt proper within a few minutes of the skirmish. Their velocity was cut severely by the inclusion of countless asteroids to maneuver around and avoid, but after exiting the 'dead zone', they made relatively good progress to their ultimate goal: Riley Freeport.


	2. Chapter 2: Improv

**II: **_Improv_

_-Whirrrr-_

A security camera panned across the small, plain meeting room. Its red-tinted eye caught everything that happened in the small space, down one of the many hallways off Riley Freeport's main concourse. Thousands of other machines like it dotted the space station, helping to keep order and prevent any form of large-scale violence from breaking out. The Freeport itself, as host to almost every conceivable form of outlaw and criminal, had very few rules to follow, but the one that was very strictly enforced by the station security force was a stern 'no drawn weapons' policy.

_-Whirrrr-_

The reflective metallic barrel of a stun blaster tracked along with the wall-mounted camera, an added deterrent to help enforce the guidelines. It watched the meeting taking place with cold, mechanical indifference, only searching for that one silhouette of a weapon to take the offending being down. It felt no pity for the level of distress that one side of the conference seemed to be filled with.

"You what?!"

"I won't pay."

"But our contract said that even if one-"

"Eh, you see," the smuggler replied, smirking with a sense of dominance as he waved his hand disapprovingly, "That's the thing about contracts; they say a lot of things."

Fox fell back in his chair with a look of defeat as his heart sank; the well dressed canine across the table from him folding his hands in an infuriatingly simple gesture of apathy. His accomplice, who Fox had immediately recognized as the freighter captain from the mission, just folded his arms and smiled a wide, toothy grin. He was enjoying watching the vulpine squirm.

"You can't do that!" Falco exclaimed, taking up where Fox left off, "We got two of your ships through; that doesn't mean anything?"

The smugglers looked at each other and shrugged, quick and shallow, "…not really, no."

The relatively unkempt captain turned his full attention to the avian, "Look, it's not that difficult to grasp, merc; you failed. You didn't hold up yer part of the deal, so we're not gonna hold up ours. End of story."

"We're only taking the time to meet with you here because we haven't quite reached an understanding with our _friends_ here on Riley," the captain's superior said, emphasizing the word 'friends' in slightly derogatory way, "So, we still have to meet with incompetent hirelings like yourselves."

The insult bounced right off the pair of mercenaries, shocked and angry as they respectively were about the smuggler boss's decision on their partially fulfilled contract. Their stature was low and submissive; they knew that they couldn't do anything to retrieve their pay, and they knew that without it, they weren't going to be able to afford the repairs and supplies they so desperately needed for their carrier and home. They were starving, and their meal had been stripped away.

"Oh…" the boss cooed, slow and mocking, "Don't look so glum, friends; I'm sure if you ask really nice, I can come up with some more work for you."

"Pah," Falco snorted, "Screw that; why would we wanna do anything even remotely tied to you guys again?"

"Well, you see…," he began, his partner standing and pulling back his vest to reveal a holstered handgun, careful to hide it from view of the security camera, "…You don't really have much of a choice." The smuggler captain took his seat again and his superior continued, speaking in a matter-of-fact tone, "Due to your neglect during the escort run, you know what kind of goods we were shipping; what would stop you from going to the authorities and gaining a nice, hefty bounty from handing over our ship tags?"

The weapon the cougar had shown presented more than just an immediate threat; one that the mercenaries weren't really intimidated by due to possession of their own firearms. Rather, it was the symbolism behind it. Crossing an organized criminal faction was something neither wanted to do, and if they somehow managed to walk and escape the inevitable loop of forced missions their submissiveness would lead to, they knew they would be hunted down.

However, the members of Star Fox were desperate; and desperation tends to give birth to ingenuity. Fox's mind raced to come up with a plan. In a minute of silent contemplation, a period that the smugglers assumed the mercenaries were spending trying to grasp their dire situation, he had run mental loops around the problem, but failed to find a way out.

"If it's the money you're really worried about," the smuggler boss offered, an expression of superiority still plastered on his muzzle, "I'm sure we could lend you enough for, oh…" He reached into his pocket and emerged with a credit wallet, opening the leather holder and pulling out a five-piece chip. It clinked on the table near the mercenaries after he tossed it towards them, the smuggler laughing a short, malicious chuckle, "Say, a wash or two for those hunks of junk you call ships."

They stared at the playing card-sized chip resting on the surface before them; the imprinted face of some famous person or another mocking them. Suddenly, Fox's eyes lit up; the wallet, combined with the earlier threatening motion that had been meant to coerce the two into working for the smugglers had given him an idea. He glanced quickly and covertly around at a few keys points around the room, checking for the components of his plan.

_"It'll work," _he confirmed silently to himself, a smug expression crossing his face, _"Er…hopefully."_

"What if we refuse?" the vulpine asked, folding his arms and staring at the smugglers with a partially faked sense of confidence. Falco snapped his head to look at his captain with question, but just as quickly mirrored his gaze at the criminals across from them. He had learned long ago to trust his friend when it looked like he had a plan, and right now was no different.

The canine smuggler laughed again, sharp and short, "Then you never leave this station alive, my friend."

Fox picked up the credit chip that had landed near him on the table, "Yeah, well, I think I'll take my chances." With that, he whipped the currency back at the smugglers and pushed his chair back to leave.

The boss fumbled with the chip for a second before loosing his previously blithe demeanor and assuming a more somber, staid expression. The freighter captain to his right glared at the mercenaries. "You should learn yer place, boy," he scowled.

"And you should learn to go easy on your boss's ass, buddy," Falco chipped in, not sure where the sudden aggression in Fox had come from, but enjoying it, "If you don't quit kissin' it, he's gonna get a rash."

Both smugglers' eyes went wide at the comment; even Fox glanced sideways at the avian with a smirk. He knew he could count on Falco to say something incredibly infuriating like that. And the vulpine could see that it was having the desired affect too; the freighter captain was slowly reaching for his vest holster.

_"Time to bring it home," _he thought.

He turned fully to the avian and caught his attention, holding his orange-furred palm open beneath the table and mouthed the words, "Don't draw."

Falco nodded, giving him a strange look but letting Fox know that he understood. The smugglers watched the silent exchange with furrowed brows and angry stares. Their hands could clearly be seen resting on their handguns.

"Stop th-" the boss began, but was cut off when the mercenaries suddenly stood up, knocking their chairs over with a loud clatter, and began to pull out their blasters.

The smugglers didn't waste a second as they too leapt to their full height and drew their weapons from their holsters, looking for a moment like they had beaten the Star Fox members to the draw. In their anger though, they had forgotten the primary rule onboard Riley Freeport; and as their aimed pistols would attest to, they were in direct violation. Their muscles only had time to tense as they realized this, and their trigger fingers tightened around their respective firing studs.

"Shi-"

Two bolts of bright blue energy sprang from the wall mounted security camera, striking the smugglers square on and discharging visible arcs of electricity through their bodies. Their spasms and cries of shock were abruptly cut off as the electrical surge overloaded their nervous systems and they crumpled to the floor, their handguns clattering to the ground. Just as abruptly as it had begun, the flurry of movement came to an end.

"_Drawn weapons detected_," a passive digital voice declared from the security camera, "_Perpetrators neutralized. Alerting station security_."

The Star Fox members stood motionless for a second, their hands still gripping their holstered blasters, before they relaxed and took stock of the situation.

"I can't believe you came up with that," Falco grinned, glancing first at the unconscious forms of the smugglers and then at Fox.

"I can't believe it worked," he retorted, smiling from relief and scratching the back of his neck. He eyed the small wallet that had fallen out of the smuggler boss's pocket when he fell; the contained credit chips had spilled halfway out. "…But we should get to it; they'll be up soon, and we gotta be long gone before that."

They quickly rounded the table and knelt by the fallen smugglers. Fox scooped up the spilt credits and counted them up, removing any stragglers from the canine's wallet and placing them in his own inner vest pocket. There was much more than any person with common sense should be carrying on them; not that Fox minded.

"Well it's not the payment," he muttered with a bit of a smirk as he got back to looting, "But it'll do for now."

Falco was busy rifling through the freighter captain's clothes, locating and extracting valuables both apparent and hidden with somewhat astonishing speed. His arms seemed to flow in and out of the various hiding places on the captain's apparel, emerging with one costly item after the next. He beamed when he noticed Fox staring at his fluid hand movements as he pilfered yet another peace of unnecessary and costly jewelry.

"I know I know," he said, gushing with a sarcastic egotism, "Call it a gift."

* * *

Blackness. Inky, dark, unyielding, blackness. 

And then, the faintest blur of light and color spilled in; cloudy and unreal at first, but quickly gaining clarity and resolution. Even the dull grey shade was a welcome relief from the monochromatic blackness. Eyes that were accustomed to the murky dark struggled to cope with the relative blast of illumination that assaulted them, and it took several seconds for his pupils to adjust.

His mind climbed back into consciousness and he was suddenly fully awake and aware. The memory of what had just happened flooded back to him like a waterfall, streaming into his mind as his anger began to reawaken and swell. They had tricked him; and what a stupid trick it had been. He couldn't believe he fell for it.

His muscles strained and burned as he fought to sit up, pushing off the cold metal floor into a sitting position while he assessed what had happened. He was alone in the room with his subordinate, still knocked out cold, and a security camera high on one of the walls. It was another minute before the cougar next to him finally came around, moaning and squeezing his eyes shut in an effort to relieve the pounding headache he felt.

With a sudden start of realization though, he saw that the members of Star Fox, those who were responsible for his current state, had escaped. He growled as he grabbed awkwardly for his comm.; they wouldn't get away with this.

"B-bastards," he growled as he depressed the pad.

"Sir?" a voice came from the other end.

"Get to the hanger!" he spat out, wincing as he heard the footsteps of Riley's security force approaching from down the hallway, "Don't let those mercenary bastards outta here!"

He let go of the comm. even before the knee of the security officer slammed into his face. But even as he was handcuffed, he had a smirk on his face; that fox and his buddy weren't leaving anytime soon.

* * *

"Woah woah woah; hold up." Fox stuck his arm out to hold Falco back as they skidded to a stop, flattening against the corner shop's wall in the shopping arcade. 

The Riley Freeport was just hitting its most crowded hours, just before dusk on Standard Corneria Time, and the pair had been virtually swept away in the tide of people as they beat a hasty retreat from the meeting room. They had run without any apparent goal or destination, unsure of any pursuit but not daring to look back. What exactly they were running from was a mystery as well; nobody would dare fire on them in the middle of a crowd of thugs and criminals. But run they did, and they didn't stop until the sign they were standing under came into view.

DOCKING BAYS A-F

The mercenary peaked around the corner down a wide, crowded hallway, at the end of which was Riley's primary hanger. The passing inhabitants of the Freeport regarded the pair's strange actions with a sideways and glance and nothing more. Most of them had seen stranger things.

"What're you doing Fox?" Falco asked with a hint of irritation, "Let's get the hell outta here!"

The vulpine ignored him and continued to peer down the corridor, looking for a certain silhouette performing a certain series of actions. A brief gap in the constantly shifting mass of people gave him a glimpse at a pair of individuals standing outside the hanger doors that met his requirements, and his heart sank.

They were dressed almost identically to the freighter captain they had left unconscious in the meeting room, and one was speaking into a comm. unit. He abruptly looked up and furtively scanned his immediate vicinity before motioning to his partner, and they moved back towards the hanger doors. A group of chatting technicians cut off Fox's line of sight when they passed between him and what he now assumed were the smuggler boss's subordinates, and he lost them in the shuffle of the crowd.

Fox's head retreated around the corner and he told Falco what he saw, but the avian wasn't fazed. "Look, what're they gonna do to stop us? They can't shoot us without being caught, and they sure as hell ain't gonna jump us. We're home free." And with that he made a move to step around the corner, but Fox grabbed him by the back of his collar and yanked him back.

"Hold on Falco; think outside the box here." His friend sighed and assumed the kind of exasperated, slightly bored look that made Fox doubt if he was even paying attention. "It's not what they'll do to us in _here_; it's what they'll do to us as soon as we leave the station. Who knows how many fighters they have waitin' outside the neutral zone?"

"Well we're not just gonna _sit_ here are we?" Falco responded quickly, throwing his hands up, "I mean, we have to leave eventually."

"Well, yeah…" Fox admitted, not having quite reached that point in his plan. He settled back against the corner building's wall and stared off into the bustling crowd of the Freeport for a moment before his vision focused back on the path they had come from.

A pair of security guards flanked a fully conscious and peacefully strolling canine, grey-furred and sporting a fresh bruise on his cheek. Behind him another familiar sight emerged from one of the many standardized booths that filled Riley's concourse. The irate freighter captain, still bearing the default scowl, was also surrounded by another couple of green-suited security personnel, and trailed behind his boss by a few steps.

The small procession came to a stop just outside the Freeport's main security office, apparently on command of the smuggler boss, who began to scan the crowds around him. He was looking for something, but what it was the vulpine couldn't discern from his distance.

Fox didn't wait to find out or make eye contact though; he grabbed Falco once more by the collar of his jacket and ducked around the corner they had been leaning against. Abruptly, they were thrown into the much calmer and more controlled surroundings of a hotel lobby, the din of bustling crowds artificially dulled by sound absorbers mounted in the ceiling of the open threshold.

The mercenaries blinked in surprise at their new environment, the sudden change of lighting and noise disorienting them momentarily. A raspy voiced clerk caught their attention while still in this stunned state.

"Uh, sirs? Can I help you?"

Fox stared dumbly for a moment at the diminutive squirrel standing behind the nearby desk before shaking his mind clear and regaining presence of mind.

"_I don't know what we're going to do," _he thought_. "…but it couldn't hurt to have a safe place to think over it."_

"Er, y-yeah," he stuttered as he crossed the short distance to the clerk's desk, fishing in his vest pocket for the credits he knew were there, "We'll take a basic room."

"Okay…" the attendant replied hesitantly, put off a bit by the vulpine's odd behavior, "Our starting rate's fifty-five credits for an economy class two-bed ro-"

"Yeah; that'll do," Fox cut in before the squirrel could finish, grasping a handful of credits from his pocket and depositing them ungracefully on the desk, stray chips bouncing away from the little pile he had placed.

The clerk's eyes widened a bit as he raised an eyebrow; that was quite a bit more than the necessary amount of credits. He did his best to hide his surprise though. He had taken his job knowing he would serve all types, and this vulpine wasn't the first to amuse him with his strange antics. In most cases, the more bizarre the client, the more abnormally large the tips anyway, so it literally paid to keep a standard expression on his face.

Fox finally counted out the various denominations of credits required to meet the fifty-five credit bill and pushed the amount towards the clerk, who shoveled the chips into his hand and into the safe box under the desk. The vulpine scooped the rest of the currency up and back into his vest pocket, but before he accepted the room access keys the attendant had already extended his way, he looked nervously back over his shoulder into the Freeport's concourse.

Nothing. As far as he could tell, nobody was watching them. Returning his attention to the squirrel and his cards, he reached into his vest one more time and pulled out a twenty credit chip. Fox passed it to the clerk as he accepted his card keys, leaning in a bit closer and lowering his voice.

"Thanks. …You ah…you never saw us."

The clerk smiled and nodded, slipping the credit into his own pocket with fluidity that suggested that it wasn't the first time he had been bribed to keep a guest's identity from others. As he leaned back out, he raised his voice to normal levels and entered some text into his terminal.

"Enjoy your stay Mr. Ecks and Mr. Whi," he said, typing the same information into the guest logs with a knowing smirk.

* * *

"So…tell me what we're doing here again?" 

"Thinking."

"…Thinking?"

"Thinking."

"…Right."

Falco paced the small but practical-sized room they had been given, impatient by the utter lack of activity coming from his partner.

"_I still don't get why we couldn't just jump in our ships and blast outta here…"_

Fox sat motionless on the foot of one of the room's two beds, staring down at the plain carpet and only blinking to confirm he hadn't been somehow frozen that way. He had been deep in thought for a good thirty minutes, and he still hadn't figured out a clean, simple way to escape the Freeport undetected. He had run through every conceivable situation in his head, but all of them came back to the spotters the smuggler boss sent to wait for the mercenaries to lift off. There was no way around them.

Another exasperated sigh from Falco. "Look, if it's that tough to think of something, why don't we just give Peppy a call?" The vulpine snapped his head to stare at the avian, who was surprised his comment got a sudden reaction from his previously dormant friend. Falco met the stare and raised an eyebrow, "What?"

Without another word, Fox sprang to his booted feet and rushed out the door and towards the lobby, where he remembered seeing a bank of public com-phones on the way in. Falco followed, equally quiet and still a little confused.

"What'd I say?"

* * *

"Well, I must say Fox; you've got yourself in quite a situation." 

Peppy's discolored image covered a small screen in a thin privacy booth in the hotel lobby, grimy and blurry as the machinery that made up the com unit due to the poor signal. His voice distorted and bent along the voice spectrum as the device struggled to maintain a clean input through the asteroid field. Even so, the hare's furrowed brow and contemplative expression came through clear enough to see he was equally at a loss of possible escape solutions.

Fox suppressed a yawn, raising a hand to cover his muzzle. "Any ideas Pep?"

"Honestly..." the elder shrugged, "I'm afraid not guys. Our former employers don't seem like a bunch that would give up interest too easily, and as far as I can tell, you two have no way of disposing of the watchdogs, so to speak. I'm stumped."

"Well that's a first," Falco quipped from the back of the open booth, his body effectively making the door.

"…At this point," Peppy said, acting like he hadn't heard the line, but noting with a bit of a smile when the avian let loose a mighty yawn, seconds behind Fox, "I'd almost suggest you sleep on it."

Fox opened his mouth to laugh and throw out such a basic and possibly dangerous suggestion, but he closed it before he spoke. It actually wasn't such a bad idea.

"_If we just wait them out, they'll have to grow tired eventually…maybe enough to take their eyes off our fighters long enough to book it out of here_," Fox contemplated silently. He tossed a glance back over his shoulder at Falco, and caught the tail end of his yawn. _"…We could probably use the sleep, too_."

Before the avian could ask what Fox was looking at, the latter turned back around and nodded wearily to the hare, "That sounds like a good idea Peppy; we'll wait them out. Thanks."

Peppy stared uncomprehendingly for a moment before Fox's words registered and he smiled, chuckling a bit, "Well, I'm glad I could be of some help. I'll hear from you some time tomorrow then?"

"Sure th-"

Falco tapped him on the shoulder in a manner that suggested it wasn't a basic bid for attention. Fox turned to face him and was about to ask what was going on, when the avian pressed a finger silently to his beak and nodded towards the lobby desk.

Through the booth's transparent windows, Fox looked in the direction his fellow mercenary had gestured, and his heart jumped. Talking to the same clerk they had spoke to about an hour before was one of the smuggler boss's operatives they had seen rushing to guard the mercenaries' arwings. The squirrel behind the desk shrugged and shook his head when the grunt asked him a question, too far away for the vulpine to hear, and the smuggler rocked back on his heels like he was about to leave.

As he began to do so though, the dull brown leopard stopped. It was out of the corner of his eye, but he could've sworn he saw someone over by the com bank that resembled the orange vulpine his boss had informed him to watch out for. It was a blur at best, but he could've sworn…

Without warning, he spun around and dashed to the row of public communications equipment, running hard towards the middle booth. He could hear someone talking in whispered sentences as he approached, although they cut off as he got within a few steps. A rusty orange tail flicked out of open end of the compartment. In an instant, he whipped around to face the interior of the tiny cubicle and drew his blaster, the elongated silencer tube flashing in the ceiling lighting. His finger tightened around the trigger…

…and then he let it relax. A terrified young fennec cowered in the corner of the booth, scared out of her mind by the sudden intrusion of the smuggler into her conversation. A retriever about the same age as her on the other end of the com call started pleading on her behalf when he saw the intruder's pistol, his frantic image only relaxing when the smuggler reholstered the weapon with a curse.

Scowling as he left the lobby at a more normal pace, he rejoined the stream of people in the Freeport concourse, ignoring the staring eyes of the rest of the lobby's inhabitants.

* * *

The door slammed shut behind the avian as soon as they poured into the room. He twisted the deadbolt and jumped back with his hand on his blaster, eyeing the door like the slab of metal itself would jump off its hinges at any moment. Fox crouched beside him, handgun drawn and aimed at the entrance. His pointed ears strained and trembled as they tried to pick up any sound from the hallway on the other side. 

A minute passed as the hotel room's occupants tensely watched the only portal to their room, jittery hands on weapons until they felt that if they had been discovered, their pursuer would probably already be at their door by now.

With a sigh, Fox finally relaxed and threw himself on one of the beds, stripping off his jacket and shoes before unceremoniously calling the first sleep shift for himself, leaving Falco on guard duty for a period of time.

"

* * *

"_Where…what…?"_

A swarm of thoughts assaulted a brain that was just barely in the stages of restarting itself, overwhelming the semi-conscious being with wave after wave of memories and sensory input. Gradually, vision began to clear and sounds began pouring in, bringing the pilot back to the situation at hand.

However, all that was ultimately accomplished was bringing the internal uncertainty and realizing it in full external alarm.

Alarm klaxons sputtered to life for seconds at a time and then abruptly died out. Screens flickered on and off at random intervals and whenever they were activated long enough to get a decent look, all they showed was a useless display of numbers and icons that had no meaning. Sparks spewed every so often from a severed power coupling somewhere below the pilot's seat. The cockpit canopy held together despite the numerous chips and cracks in the tempered glass and plastic mixture.

The pilot, wiping goggles with a hand spotted in both a natural fur pattern and crimson red, peered out of the cockpit into the asteroid belt beyond, and was further dismayed by what was seen. Somehow, the fighter, or what was left of it, had impaled its wing into a soft but sturdy clump of rock and dirt, and was slowly spinning with the asteroid as it bled off the force of the initial impact.

While gazing numbly off into the endless fields of similar boulders, the pilot suddenly remembered what had led to this point.

"_The raid… …the convoy…escorts…retreat… …collision…shit..."_

That was it. The last thing the pilot remembered was lining up for a head-on run with one of the convoy's escorts. They charged each other, both firing furiously, and then…

The pilot closed her eyes; she was tired all of a sudden. She knew she should probably stay awake and try to find a way to send up a mayday of some sort, but rest abruptly took a top place in her mind. Her head lolled back as she drifted back into the sweet, welcoming arms of unconsciousness.

"_No…I have to…send…for help……I have…to…"_


	3. Chapter 3: Arbiter

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who reviewed the past two chapters; seriously guys, it means alot.

* * *

**III: **_Arbiter_

Two ships, identical to each other, shot towards each other in a thick, grimy atmosphere. Its noxious clouds and polluted air all but covered the ships themselves, but the laser-fire lancing between them coupled with their engine trails in providing their positions to any other fighters in the area. Not that there were any.

The pilots seemed perfectly matched in skill level, and neither was able to get the upper hand on the other for the eternity in which they fought, diving towards, away, and all around each other. An occasional shot would land, grazing shields, but the stricken pilot would always be able to escape long enough to recharge their protection before reentering the fray. Forever would pass, and no progress would be made.

Fox had gotten used to the drill by now. He was suspended at an isometric view of the skirmish, ethereal in every aspect save his ability to scream. This dream had reoccurred so many times that he had gotten past the point where he was fully aware that it _was _a dream; he was to the point where he could count down the seconds until it happened.

But it still terrified him to the core every time.

Abruptly, one of the streamlined fighters sprang a hole in its engine, spouting smoke and flame as it began to hurtle towards the planet's surface. There had been no signs that its shields had been breached; the craft just spontaneously formed the fatal wound. The opposing fighter swooped in to follow his spiraling adversary down to the ground, pulling close enough to make eye-contact through the pilot's canopy.

Fox was yanked by an invisible string. He expected it. He didn't even struggle anymore. He just let it tug him between the rapidly descending fighters like it always did, the speed bringing tears to his insubstantial eyes. As he was pulled surface-ward, he peered into one of the cockpits, already knowing and dreading what he would see.

The first time the dream occurred, the mere sight of those signature sunglasses and strong, determined features had reduced him to sobbing convulsions upon waking. Now, the vision left Fox cold and hollow inside, like he was looking into the face of death itself. The strikingly similar vulpine inside the failing fighter's cockpit turned to stare back at Fox, _past _Fox.

The younger McCloud turned to see who the elder was staring at: at who was piloting the other Arwing that had shot him down. But Fox knew he'd never be able to turn in time. He only got as far as to look at the ground before it rushed up to meet him in a flash.

"Fox!"

* * *

The vulpine's eyes sprang open and he sat forward with a start, gasping for breath. His hand instinctively grasped the blaster he had let fall in his lap when he dozed off and brought it to bear on the door, expecting the worst as his mind scrambled to throw off the last vestiges of the dream. 

The door was still intact. In fact, nothing had changed in the room since he had taken over guard duty from Falco some time ago. Everything was okay. The only difference was a light chuckling from the room's other occupant.

"Ya see, that's why you can't let a canid take guard," the avian smirked from his bed as the vulpine lowered his pistol, "They'll fall asleep before you can say 'biscuit'."

"Shut up, Falc," Fox replied with a relieved smile, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he staggered to a standing position and nabbed his jacket from the bed he had been leaning against, opposite Falco's. He tried to ignore the fact that his blaster hand was still shaking.

"Just messin' wit ya Foxie," he replied, springing into his boots and pulling his own flight jacket on. "So," he continued, sheathing his gun into its holster, "Ready to get outta here?"

* * *

Fox peered tentatively around the public docking bay as he and Falco stepped in through a side entrance. It was still the early hours, or what could be considered them on a space station without standardized time, so the cavernous hanger was mostly devoid of living inhabitants. However, there were still row upon row of all manner of personal spacecraft, providing an uncountable number of potential hiding places for any would-be shadow assigned to track them. 

The variety of vessels was staggering, ranging from the oldest, most run-down pieces of junk Fox had ever seen, to the newest, souped up performance personal fighters. If he weren't in the middle of trying to escape, he would've taken a moment to admire some of the latter. They were all arrayed out beneath the watchful eyes of a control crew in a booth high up on one of the walls, keeping all inbound and outbound traffic in order. At least, he assumed the 'watchful eyes' part; the vulpine couldn't see past the reflective glass of the protruding control booth.

Falco stepped up even with the vulpine and inhaled deeply, pulling in the tinny scent of recycled air and the grubby smell of spent fuel and oil. He shuddered and smirked, taking another step forward into the overall dingy and well-used bay.

"I never though I'd say this," he said, "But I think I need to thank Slippy: for not letting our hanger end up like _this_."

"Yeah," Fox agreed, keeping step with the taller avian but not really paying attention to him as they weaved their way to their Arwings. He hadn't seen anything yet, but around every curve of a freighter or weapon emplacement of a fighter he expected to see a glimpse of a follower's silhouette. The fact that he hadn't been able to discern anything suspicious by the time they reached their fighters didn't set him at ease either.

"_That could just mean that they're really good at what they do_," he thought as he popped the canopy of his fighter and climbed in.

He settled into his comfortably worn seat and began activating the necessary sequences to start up his ship, smiling as the cockpit closed and sealed around him. Whatever it was that set him on edge outside in the hanger melted away with the sound of the Arwing's engine humming to life. Inside the protective cocoon of his cockpit, Fox McCloud felt safe.

Then he spied the dried spots of red that dotted a portion of his dash, arrayed in a spatter pattern. He unconsciously raised a tipless-gloved hand to his cheek and felt the scab that had formed over the gash that he had acquired the day before.

"_Well," _he told himself, not letting the memory of his minor injury ruin the calm, or his smile,_ "_Almost _safe, anyway." _

He added an extra step to his usual routine, sending a query to his fighter's computer as he commed Falco to do the same. It was a simple request, asking for a basic statistic, but Fox knew it was a necessary precaution. A moment or two later, the answer returned in the form of a numerical figure and a universal symbol for weight. He smiled: everything checked out. Almost immediately, Fox got a return message from Falco, his portrait bordered in the gold of a private transmission.

"Yep. My Arwing came back the same exact mass as before, down to the n-th decimal. If someone put a tracking device on these things, it'd have to weigh less than spit."

Fox nodded confidently as his wingman's picture winked out, glad to know that neither of their fighters had been bugged. Switching frequencies to a different channel, he keyed his own com unit and broadcast his message.

"Flight SF Alpha to Riley exit control, permission to launch."

The com played dead static for a few seconds until a tired and slightly irritable voice responded, sounding like he was fumbling with something, "Ye-yeah; go on. You're clear. Go."

Fox blinked, stunned. Shrugging, he then closed the channel and activated his repulsor lifts by flipping a switch on his dash, realizing that he shouldn't have expected too much in the way of formalities at a Freeport.

Downward slanting thrusters placed at regular intervals through the Arwing's ventral hull flared to life, spouting superheated gas towards the hanger floor and providing enough power to lift the craft. His fighter rose several meters until it was well above the rest of the ships in the bay, and began to turn in place at a slow, lazy pace until he could see the massive hanger bay entrance. The doors were kept open as they usually were in public hangers, leaving only an invisible magnetic containment field to hold the atmosphere in and the vacuum out.

As soon as both Arwings were aligned properly, Fox nudged the throttle forward and his fighter crawled overtop of the neighboring parked vessels towards open space. The nose of his craft touched the magnetic field and the ship slipped forward, the field hugging to his fighter at the molecular level until it passed all the way through. Then, once Falco cleared the hanger and both ships were away from the station, he goosed the thrusters and they were off.

* * *

"Ay, get up." 

A vicious kick to the shin jerked the dozing smuggler awake with a yip. He rubbed his leg where it had been struck and looked up at whoever had disrupted his peaceful nap, growling curses.

"Ugh...what gives, Erit?"

"It's my shift now," he replied to the skinny lupine, slumped against the wall next to one of the main hanger entrances, "Didya see anything, or were you sleepin' the whole time?"

"Nah, nah," the wolf replied, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he pushed off the wall and struggled to his feet, "I couldn't 'ave been out _that _long."

He stood to full height and let out a mighty yawn, shooting his scrawny arms out to the side and tilting his head back. As it came back down to look at his replacement though, his eye caught something wrong in his peripheral. Several ship ships down the column he had been napping by were a couple of personal freighters in spots that the smuggler knew they shouldn't be.

His replacement followed his stare and noticed the same thing.

"Hey…isn't that where those two mercs were parked?"

* * *

_Psshwsshhshshhshsssh_

A burst of static jolted the pilot out of her unconsciousness, abruptly plucking her from her idle swimming in a sea of mental mist and fog, and throwing the pilot back into the world of the aware. Partially.

Her cockpit, or what was left of it, had changed since she relapsed back into her temporary coma. The panels and instruments that had been flickering in a vain attempt to regain function were now completely dead, although every couple of seconds the split power cord would still flare up with a shower of sparks. They sprang all over the small space - just large enough for a pilot to twist and move their arms comfortably - and singed flesh and cloth.

The chips and cracks in the canopy had spread and webbed outward, results of the cockpit's losing battle to retain the relatively high-pressure air inside. Outside the veined canopy, she noticed with a cloudy indifference that the asteroid her ship had been buried in had stopped spinning. While still very detached, her mind was sharp enough at this point to realize that in space, the asteroid would've had no gravity to stop its spinning; it must've been done by an outside influence.

Suddenly, a blocky, hodge-podge vessel emerged from the opposite side of the asteroid. About four times the size of the pilot's broken fighter, the ship dragged a pair of dangling, heavy-duty claws beneath its bulk, giving it the appearance of an ancient undersea creature probing for prey. A pair of smaller craft converged above the lumbering machine, more angled and sleeker than their larger counterpart, but no less upsetting to the half-conscious pilot.

The com unit continued to spit static as the clawed monstrosity neared the helpless wreck of a starfighter. One of the arms abruptly activated and twisted, reaching up and towards the remains before it suddenly froze in place. The static briefly cleared, and the pilot's slanted ears twitched as she barely made out the sound of two distinctly different voices as they were warped and bent by the malfunctioning com.

"…think the pilot's alive, cap."

"Nuh-uh; look's dead ta me," a second, deeper voice responded.

"You sure? I'm pretty sure I – there! See that? He moved again!" the first speaker said.

"Where?"

"I'm pretty sure his arm moved that time." The first voice seemed unsure of himself.

"You're seeing things buddy; I didn't see shit."

"It's not like it'd make a difference," a third voice chimed in, "Boss wants his fighter back, with or without the pilot. 'Without' is a whole lot easier."

"…good point," the first two voices said in unison after a short pause.

The com returned to solid static and the frozen claw jerked and continued on its path towards the cockpit. There wasn't a possibility that the massive piece of machinery which was opening up to grip the broken fighter was going to be gentle enough to allow the fragile canopy to stay intact.

Realizing this through her stupor, the bloodied and beaten pilot instinctively grabbed for the ejection handle.

* * *

"Well…I think we're clear," Fox said as he sat back in his seat and activated the autopilot feature of his Arwing, letting the control stick slip from his grasp. 

The pair of fighters had left Riley Freeport without further incident, and after spending a length of time navigating the densely grouped asteroids outside the base's perimeter, they had returned to the Briar Pocket, opting to take the familiar way back home. Fox was content with himself; his plan seemed to have worked perfectly, and minus about ninety percent of the payment, their initial mission had proven to be a success. He always felt a certain satisfaction in knowing that he had completed an objective.

Meteos thinned out ahead of them as they entered the Pocket, the asteroids parting to reveal the gap in the field they had left only a half a day before. Fox expected an easy flight through the area and back to the _Great Fox_, which was waiting for the pair of Arwings back at the outermost edge of the massive asteroid belt. After all, they weren't protecting anything of particular value this time around.

"_And if I know enough about my fellow rogues and urchins, they should all be asleep at this time anyway," _he thought to himself with a smirk, recounting the names he and his own mercenary troop had been called several times over as he glanced at his fighter's time display. It was just past noon in Corneria City.

Out of nowhere, his previously dormant scanner beeped to life and a faint blue targeting box appeared on his cockpit canopy, bracketing a distant asteroid just outside the clearing of the Briar Pocket. The vulpine pilot sat up in his pilot's couch and took notice of the occurance. His scanner showed that the signal had just made itself known, rather than the Arwing having stumbled into range of an already broadcasting communication. Fox punched a button on his console, and a scrolling message appeared on his HUD, crawling along the bottom of his display.

DISTRESS. DISTRESS. HELP REQUIRED. PLEASE ASSIST.

The vulpine peered through the canopy at the far off asteroid, confused. _"It looks like a rock." _Not trusting his own vision through, he targeted the bracket denoting where the distress signal was coming from. The targeting camera zoomed in on the asteroid and produced an image, also on the HUD.

It showed a largish, boxy freighter and a pair of smaller escorts next to an oval-shaped hunk of dirt and rock. But it was a disabled fighter, identified in the real-time picture once more by the blue bracket, which took Fox's interest. It looked like it had been through one hell of a battle; it was missing half its hull, and its engines had been completely demolished. The thruster block behind the cockpit wasn't even present, and a tangled mesh of support rods and thick wires occupied its place, almost as if it had been…

"…_Ripped out. ...Oh man; there's no way...that's him."_

Falco's perplexed image popped up next to the zoomed in picture, and his voice came through the com a second later.

"Hey Fox…are you getting this distress signal too?"

Fox would never know what it was that made him do what he did. It could've been what Peppy had always described as an 'inborn need to do what's right,' or maybe he just felt like taking a closer look, and it just went a bit further than that. Either way, he had already decided what he was going to do the second he made the connection between the fighter he had rammed during the fighting a half day ago, and the remains he was looking at right now. Suddenly, it's protection was all he cared about.

His Arwing's quietly humming engine was suddenly thrown into high gear when Fox punched the thruster lever, pushing him back in his command couch as the G Diffuser system struggled to keep up with the sudden acceleration. Falco shouted something in confusion, but the vulpine's scanner showed the avian forming up and following, so Fox pressed on without worrying about his wingman. He'd catch up.

Instead, the mercenary coolly reached over and powered up his weapons and combat shields.

* * *

The pilot squeezed her eyes shut… 

…and after what felt like an eternity, re-opened them. Nothing happened. She looked over in dismay at a small control panel on the side of the cockpit, and hazily noticed the reason why she wasn't ejecting away from her wreck of a fighter.

A splotch of blood, no doubt from her own hand, covered an activated switch labeled 'distress'. She managed to fit an annoyed sigh between her labored breaths, and she reached again to grasp the ejection handle located directly below the switch. As her trembling fingers wrapped around the grip though, a sudden burst of verdant light from outside her cockpit froze her dripping hand in place. For a moment she thought one of her laser cannons had overloaded and blown a capacitor from all the electrical damage done to her ship.

Then she saw another stream of light. And another. They plowed into the clawed ship, severing supports and blasting through the hull plating, peeling it back like the skin of a fruit. One pair of green hued bolts snapped the reaching arm of the vessel off at the elbow joint, letting it float free as the freighter turned as fast as its boxy chassis would allow and attempt to escape.

Her effort to eject and sudden increase in heart-rate overtaxed her fragile consciousness though, and her vision began to cloud up. She couldn't quite comprehend what was happening, but she knew she felt disappointment at not being able to see anymore. She knew she felt disappointment at not being able to have any control over her own life anymore, and that it was outside her hands.

And she knew she felt disappointment she probably wouldn't have a chance to thank whoever was piloting the two blue and white fighters that streaked into her field of vision just before she blacked out.

* * *

"The claw guy's breakin' off; aim for the snubfighters." 

"Don't know why the hell I followed you, but you got it Fox."

The Arwings pulled into a synchronized tandem loop as they cruised past the wrecked fighter on their first run, successfully driving off the salvage freighter that was about to make off it with it. Their loop dropped them back on a heading that led directly back the way they came, where Fox saw the escorting fighters making a run for it.

The vulpine jammed the afterburners and was on the pair of scavengers before they could react. He spitted one in his crosshairs and opened fire, green bolts of deadly energy lancing into the enemy's meager shields and bringing them down in only a few shots. Before he could finish his target off though, he failed to bleed off enough momentum from his boosters and overshot it. Off to his right he could see Falco having done the same.

"Pahaha, wow," the avian laughed over the com, "That probably wasn't even intentional on their part. I think those slagships are just naturally _that _slow!"

Fox nodded his amused agreement as he banked on his left wing and curved around a larger asteroid, soaring back towards his own wake. He expected to see the front of one or more of the enemy fighters barreling towards him, but instead he saw the back of one as it boosted away from him, headed towards the wrecked ship, which was still bracketed in blue. He cocked his head to the side in momentary confusion.

It took a second for the merc to realize it, but when he dawned on _why_, he swore out loud into the com. _"If they can't have the wreck, they're not gonna let _anyone _have it."_

He gritted his teeth and again activated his thruster, hoping in the back of his head that it wouldn't burn out with such frequent use. The G-forces accumulated as his speed increased, pushing him back into his flight seat as his fighter attained incredible velocities. He caught up with his foe just as the weaker fighter began attacking the stranded ship. The beams of coherent rose light landed just prior to where the disabled craft was wedged into the asteroid, blowing out chunks of dirt and rock but not doing any apparent damage to the ship.

Fox lined up an accurate shot and thumbed his fire selector to the linked setting. Tensing his trigger finger on the stick, he waited until he was sure he'd land a solid shot and not miss and hit what he was trying to save. His targeting crosshairs flashed green, and he squeezed the firing stud once, launching a pair of emerald bolts of deadly energy.

They both struck soundly into his opponent's unshielded backside, touching off the reactor and splitting the enemy ship in two with a bright flare. He peeled off as the two resulting halves sailed under and over the floating disabled fighter – now freed from it's attachment to the asteroid – and he throttled down, satisfied with his work.

His radar showed that Falco was chasing the other fighter away from the scene, and he decided let the avian have his fun, instead opting to investigate the source of the initial distress signal.

Fox turned his Arwing towards the now free-floating wreck, nudging his engines ever so slightly so as to get close to and match the ship's slow drift back towards the Briar Pocket. When he got close enough, he leaned forward in his seat and peered into the cracked and beaten canopy of the remains of the wrecked fighter, trying to see beyond the web of chips and slowly spreading fractures in the transparent material. What he saw was enough to make his heart jump.

The pilot of the fighter appeared slumped and lifeless in the control seat. Fox could easily make out through both cockpit canopies that the pilot had suffered grevious injuries when he had been rammed by the vulpine a dozen or so hours ago; dried rivers of crimson red ran down his pilot's jumpsuit, and his arm seemed bent at an abnormal angle. The full extent of his injuries were hidden to the vulpine though, by a jungle of loose wires and debris inside the cockpit.

"'_He,'" _the vulpine thought as he set his Arwing's scanners to work on the wreck, "_I don't even know _that _much. With those goggles and jumpsuit in the way, '_he'_ could very well be a '_she'_."_

Regardless of the gender – his Arwing didn't carry the necessary equipment to scan for it anyhow – Fox felt a certain sorrow upon seeing the pilot's condition. It welled up in him, becoming a solid knot in his stomach, and a single thought came to occupy his mind.

"I _did this." _

He'd shot down scores of unnamed and unseen pilots since picking up the flight stick and becoming a mercenary, but he'd never been this close to one of his 'kills'. It was an eerie sensation to think that, from the looks of it, he had probably robbed this pilot of his future. Whatever chain of events the pilot's presence in the universe would've set off was now, in all likeliness, closed. It made him think philosophically for a moment.

"…_Is this how I'm going to end up one day? I'm sure he never expected to end up like this…nobody ever does…"_

He felt the old familiar sickness that always crept up on him when he thought too heavily on a subject he didn't like. It started in his gut and spread throughout, perforating his consciousness and seeding doubt in his nerves. Fox shuttered. Why couldn't he just be the indifferent mercenary he was supposed to be? It'd be so much simpler that way. But, before it could take root, Falco abruptly interrupted his thoughts.

"Fox!" he called, his image frantic, "Heads up! He got away from me and he's goosin' it back your way!"

Fox stared at his wingman for a second and then down at the unconscious body only a few meters away from him. He knew the pilot and his broken ship were the bandit's ultimate target. His radar showed the second scavenger escort closing rapidly with his current position.

"_All I know is that this is _not _how I'd wanna go down."_

His decision made, the mercenary gently but quickly maneuvered his Arwing so that the other, broken fighter was directly beneath him, with what was left of the cockpit and upper chassis below the vulpine's seat. He powered up the magnetic plates that lined the surface of his ventral hull, and with an added layer of droning that meshed with the hum of engines, Fox felt a delicate thud as the broken fighter magnetically bonded to the plates.

Nodding to himself as he counted down the probable time until the enemy opened fire, he then diverted as much power from his engines and weapons to his shield system as he could in an effort to build enough protective energy to survive the onslaught he knew was about to receive from Falco's errant prey. With the remains of the derelict fighter attached to his own, Fox knew that his maneuvering and acceleration would be thrown way off, and he had no hope of outperforming the scavenger's fighter with the additional mass onboard.

However, as he checked to make sure the power diversion was going smoothly, his heart caught in his throat. A small message flashed on his display in red font, incessantly reminding him of the rule that he should have realized right away.

EXTERNAL MASS DETECTED. UNABLE TO ACTIVATE SHIELDS. PLEASE REMOVE EXTERNAL MASS.

"Falco, hurry!" he hollered anxiously into the com, watching the enemy snubfighter close in, "I can't get my shields up."

"What?!" Falco replied, the background din of his own Arwing revving up as he hammered his thrusters past their limits, "Guh, hold on Fox."

"_Damnit damnit damnit!"_

The vulpine's mind raced and time slowed down. The arching scavenger's fighter dove towards the pair of linked ships with a sudden, slow-motion grace, persistently gliding towards the point where it would open fire on the unshielded duo of vessels. _"I can't turn and fire; he'd still get his shots off. I can't cut and run; he'd finish this ship off. I've already diverted power to the friggin' shields; my weapons are shot anyway. What…what am I…what can I…"_

He kept hoping to see the enemy ship explode from the blasts of green that Falco should've been firing at any second. He expected the foe to suddenly stop and hold its fire for some reason. He reasoned with himself that the scavanger would probably be a bad shot. It just didn't seem possible to him that Fox McCloud could die there in the next few seconds. It wasn't how the Hero of Lylat was supposed to go.

Then, without ceremony, scarlet bolts began pouring into the twosome of connected fighters. They scarred and scored Fox's hull, leaving dark black streaks, and one bolt melted Fox's exposed starboard laser cannon, fusing it shut with the bolt's incredibly superheated energy. He knew a direct hit to the cockpit would puncture it without trouble, and he kept expecting it to happen at any time. The enemy fighter got closer and his aim improved until one shot sizzled abruptly across Fox's field of vision.

"Hold on Fox!"

His eyes instinctively squeezed shut, both from the sheer intensity of the laser light passing that close by his face, but also so that he wouldn't see the gaping hole that was left by the bolt. He expected to be violently shunted into cold vacuum at any moment, if he wasn't spontaneously incinerated by the laser itself. But then, something unexpected happened. An explosion, sounding muffled and far away, put a halt to the stream of crimson fire and pelted the Arwing with debris.

One emerald iris sprang open.

Fox stared mutely. Directly across the front of his canopy, the laser bolt had melted the high density transparent material halfway through where it had skimmed the windscreen, leaving a distorted streak that stretched across his vision. It was as if the strip of cockpit material had been liquified and almost immediately refrozen in an irregular pattern. He felt the cockpit covering with trembling fingers; it was still blisteringly hot.

Falco's fighter continued on its trajectory towards the side of Fox's Arwing as he rolled it upside down, giving the avian a clear view into the Arwing's cockpit as he screeched by. A dazed vulpine threw a 'thumbs up' as the raptor passed.

"That's twice in one day Fox," Falco broadcast over the com, smirking at his captain as he looped around and pulled to a stop perpendicular with the other mercenary, "If I were the kind of guy who bet on your survival, I'd be out a couple thousand credits by now."

"Thanks for the reassurance," he replied with a tired smile, "How's my buddy doing?"

"Who me? Ah, ya know; that guy only got away from me cause I _let _him-"

"No, Falco," Fox interrupted, still grinning from sheer relief at his friend but pointing his finger downward, "I mean the guy beneath me."

"Oh." Falco looked perplexed for a moment before catching on and peering out his cockpit at what the vulpine was unable to see directly beneath him, "_Oh_. Um…he ain't moving, but I don't think any of those shots got to him. His canopy's still intact...kinda. He probably just nodded off or something. Looks kinda beat up."

Fox was silent for awhile. He quietly contemplated every possible decision that could be made at that moment – he could ditch the whole deal and run, he could call in an actual rescue team, he could tow the wreck back to Riley – and kept coming back to a single favorable outcome. A deep inhale and exhale later, his voice reactivated the com system.

"So…do you think his ship'll hold up long enough to tow it back to the _Great Fox_?"

"Well, I think so…" Falco began, but his eyes grew wide in alarm as he realized what his friend was suggesting, "Wait, _what_?! You…you don't honestly want to take him with us, do you?"

"Well…yeah. I'm definitely not gonna _leave_ him out here if that's what you mean."

Fox illustrated his point by turning his Arwing and gently pushing the throttle forward, pulling back into the Briar Pocket with his cargo securely in tow beneath him. He soon reached his fighter's normal cruising speed, knowing that the metallic bond between his ship and the one underneath him would hold up against everything but the most violent acceleration. Falco tentatively followed on his friend's wing as he tried to talk sense into the vulpine.

"But you can't bring him _back _with us either," he exclaimed, "What're we gonna do with him? We barely have enough cash to take care of ourselves without another mouth to feed, and that's not counting the hit of whatever medical costs we'll have to take for this guy."

Fox remained silent and just continued along his course, waiting for the avian's complaints to work themselves out. His mind was already set on what he was doing.

Over the couple of years that he had been a mercenary, Fox had killed a countless number of pilots and soldiers in the pursuit of nothing more than a paycheck. Granted, his critical involvement in the Lylat War had been purely a work of charity and morality, but the missions and contracts he had taken since then had, for the most part, ended with at least a few deaths on his enemy's side, and a sum of money in his bank account. It had taken until the moment he saw the pilot of the broken craft he was towing face to face for him to feel the true consequences of his actions.

He had never before considered that the pilots of all of the ships he had fought and destroyed were living beings with their own lives, goals, and families. He had always been able to push the idea out of his mind during combat, and he had a feeling that he would still be able to do so in the future. But just once, Fox wanted to be able to save one of his victims, even if it only meant letting him die in a warm bed instead of in the cold vacuum of space. Just once, he wanted to prove to himself that he was worthy of some of the compliments he had been given in response to his actions in the Lylat War.

Fox wasn't planning on keeping the pilot with him and his team for any long period of time, but he wanted to at least provide a means for possibly letting the heavily injured being live, whoever he was. As he and his wingman continued through Meteos, Fox knew that he wouldn't have been able to shake the guilt if he had done nothing.

"…_I just hope Peppy doesn't go ballistic._"

* * *

Alright, I'm not gonna beg for reviews or anything, but any that are left are greatly appreciated. If you see something you like or don't like about this chapter or my writing in general, let me know! Seriously. That's what they're there for. And if you're reading this right now, then an extra thank you for just reading the whole chapter. 


	4. Chapter 4: Hospice

**IV**_: Hospice_

A thin wisp of fragrant steam curled up from a worn mug as a gray furred paw wrapped around its handle. The old hare lifted the cup and gently sipped its contents, satisfied with the taste of the russet liquid as he leaned back into his cushioned swivel chair. Lights faded on and off on a bank of consoles that stretched before him, indicating an unwritten list of things to be done that morning. A faint odor of ozone reminded him that he was still aboard a ship breathing recycled air, and not on the peaceful walk through nature he never seemed to have time for.

A faint rumbling from the depths of the ship indicated the start up of another system, reminding him that he was on a smallish bridge. But for all the things the control center was not, the hare loved every part that it was. It was the place where everything happened. In his seat, he could control the massive collection of simple and complex machines that ultimately made up the _Great Fox_. At his fingertips were the buttons and banks of memory that made up almost every aspect of his adult life.

When he was reclining in his chair, carefully tasting a freshly brewed caf-ration, gazing at the wonders of space spread out through the view port before him, he was at peace.

"Hey, _Peppy_!"

Peppy Hare spat out his mouthful of steaming hot fluid and juggled his mostly full mug for a moment before miraculously regaining control of it, a good amount of the drink having sloshed over onto his pants and the floor. He whipped around and stared at who had interrupted the calm so suddenly.

"What!?"

The stubby amphibian that had called his name from the bridge doors not more than a couple of meters away shrank under the withering glare his elder targeted him with, and he took a second to work up the courage to speak.

"…Um…sorry Peppy," he murmured, assuming the stature of a schoolchild who was about to be slapped on the wrist while at the same time failing to hide a creeping grin that was beginning to wash over his face.

The hare glanced down at his stained trousers and the wet floor around him, and then at the half empty mug in his hands. He frowned at Slippy again, although this time without malice. A smile of his own tugged at his lips.

"Ugh…don't worry about it Slip," he finally said grudgingly, his mug still in hand. "What'd you need?"

"I uh, I got a message from Fox when I was up here a little while ago," he replied, still trying to hide his amusement at what had resulted from him surprising Peppy, "He said he and Falco'd reach us in an hour…two hours…I dunno. The com signal was really bad."

"Mm," Peppy said in an agreeing manner, wiping excess caf-ration from the knees of his trousers, "Meteos will do that."

"Yeah…" Slippy agreed, "But, I know that they'll be here soon, so I just wanted to let you know."

"Alright; thanks Slip." Peppy got up and stepped forward to leave the bridge, but before he got more than one footfall from his chair, he heard his boot splash in liquid. He looked down and lifted up his foot, frowning again.

Slippy watched with apprehension and knew what the hare was going to ask before the elder could even speak, "You want me to clean that up, right?"

Peppy breathed aloud and nodded solemnly as he finished what was left of his mug's contents, patting the toad on the back as he walked by and out of the bridge, and towards a fresh pair of trousers in his quarters, "Yep."

* * *

"Good _lord_; I thought these rocks were gonna go on for_ever_," Falco quipped. 

On the very fringe of the asteroid field, Fox could spy the dull gray, uniquely shaped carrier that was the _Great Fox. _The massive doors of the docking bay, slung under the vessel like a pouch, were already open and the interior lit, beckoning the pair of mercenaries in as they neared their home ship.

"Well there you two are," Peppy's voice came filtering through the com system, his com image and audio undistorted and clear for the first time since the mission started. The vulpine couldn't help but think of a father welcoming his kids back from a day of play as the hare spoke. Through the com portrait, Fox could see Peppy squinting at a console off to the side, "And…it appears you're a little heavier than before. Who'd you pick up?"

"Actually…we're not exactly sure," the vulpine replied, shrugging lightly and fixing a slightly apologetic expression on his muzzle. "It's kind of a long story."

"I'm gonna go ahead and state for the record beforehand that this was all Foxie's idea," Falco cut in as they approached the _Great Fox _and leveled off in front of its gaping hanger doors.

Peppy nodded and let his lips curl into a smirk, hearing the avian's comment but keeping his attention on Fox, "Well, we've got plenty of time on the trip back to Corneria. I could use a story."

* * *

_-Thud-_

The sound of the bay doors closing shut and sealing themselves off from the vacuum of space resounded throughout the lower floor of the _Great Fox_. A hissing gradually intensified as breathable gases filtered into the hanger, increasing to a point and then decreasing on an equally slow curve as it had began. The green light that signaled a balance of air pressure between the docking bay and the connecting hallway had barely lit up when Peppy strolled through the door, accompanied by a curious Slippy.

Adjacent to the pair of recently landed Arwings, the battered hulk of a fighter rested uneasily on the hanger floor, twisted and damaged beyond any recognition of a craft model or make. The only prominent structure that was still discernable amidst the heap of scrap was the transparent cockpit, and it was this that caught the entire crew's attention as they approached it, Fox and Falco having disembarked from their own, cooling fighters.

"Jeepers Fox," Slippy wondered aloud, picking up a small rod of metal off the hanger floor that had been knocked loose from the wreck by the landing, "What'd you do to 'er?"

The vulpine didn't respond, transfixed instead by the clear angles of the cockpit canopy. Or rather, what was behind it.

Being on an uneven tilt due to its extensive damage, the broken fighter's canopy was at eye level on one side. Fox approached this side with a purposeful stride, ignoring his teammates, who were watching him as they expected an answer to Slippy's question. Falco extended a hand towards the vulpine and looked at Peppy, silently asking him what his friend was doing. The hare just shrugged as Fox placed his palms gently on the heavily damaged canopy and stared in.

The pilot inside was still. It wasn't that Fox wasn't expecting the pilot to necessarily live during the trip back to the _Great Fox_; it would be a miracle if the life support system survived the initial collision. It was just that the mercenary captain had never actually gotten a good look at the foe he had literally gone head to head with. He peered into the cockpit for a better look.

The pilot was on its side at an uncomfortable angle, facing away from the vulpine. Due to the cockpit's interior damage, including several blown out consoles and hanging wires, Fox couldn't get a straight look at much of the pilot, but a few features stuck out. A pair of wilted, pointed ears jutted out of the helmet, although it could easily be seen that they were once straight and proud. A long crimson smear sloshed down the side of a worn leather flight jacket, similar to Fox's own save for color.

Fox thought he saw the slightest of movements in the pilot's thin, outstretched hand, but he dismissed it as a trick of the bright hanger lights as he turned and called his teammates over. They began to oblige, and the vulpine turned back towards the cockpit.

When he did, his veins turned to ice.

An impossibly bright red stream flowed from the pilot's heavily stained palms Fox had dismissed a second ago, running down the canopy he was only inches away from as they scratched and pawed nauseatingly at the solid, transparent material. Just behind it, before the searing image was covered up by another scarlet swipe of blood, a pair of eyes glowed desperately in half shut sockets. The pilot was saying something, but it was lost in the confines of the cockpit as the scraping of nail and flesh on the cockpit viewport material overtook it.

"S-slippy!" Fox sputtered, refusing or unable to look away from the spine-chilling sight before him as the pilot continued to try to literally claw its way out of the failing canopy, "Give me that!"

Slippy looked down at the piece of metal slag in his hands, uncomprehending and hesitating long enough for Falco to step forward and grab it from him. The avian had seen what Fox saw, and understood what had to be done, and waited only long enough for Fox to duck out of the way.

Falco tightened his grip, shuffle-stepped to the cockpit, and swung.

* * *

A crash. 

Shattering. A din of voices and commands. Indiscernible.

Frantic clutching and grasping. Fresh blood from the splinters. More cuts. More damage.

A face. Rusty orange. Fresh air. Used air. More commands. It's getting warm.

Who are you? Where am I?

More commands. Softer this time. Reassuring.

A hand. Around the back. It tugs, but it's stopped. Tightness at the shoulders. Tightness at the waist.

An object in the hand. A flash. Another flash. The hand again. Empty. It draws towards the fresh air. Unimpeded.

A rhythm of steps. Hurried. Frenetic. More faces.

Who are you? Where am I?

Brighter lights. Another face. Not flesh. Metal. A metal face.

Pain. In the arm. Fading. Soothing.

A face. The first one again. Rusty. Speech. Soft.

Who are you? Where…

* * *

Fox stared at his palms. 

The fingertip-less gloves were torn by the stubborn remains of the pilot's cockpit canopy. A few specks of the shattered material still remained in the cloth. The delicate rusty orange fur beneath was matted with an amount of blood that still surprised him. Not all of it was the pilot's. The flesh below the fur was torn and strained, contributing to the crimson above.

And despite all this, it didn't stop him from slowly lifting his palms and rubbing them gently over his eyes and forehead in an effort to settle himself.

He sat on the single bunk in his room, hunched over and out of breath, even though the whole event had taken place a half an hour ago. Everything that had happened, from the moment Falco had smashed the cockpit to the sealing of the modest med bay they maintained on board the _Great Fox_, the pilot, Peppy, and the team's android ROB within, had drained him. Fox simply wasn't prepared.

When he had grabbed the back of the pilot's soaked jacket, his fingers had slipped and slid in the blood soaked cloth, struggling to gain a grip. The pilot's arm bounced and swung horribly as they rushed through the _Great Fox's _hallways, dislocated at the shoulder. There was still a trail of red droplets leading back to the hanger. And all the while, the pilot was conscious. _She_, was conscious.

When he gently rubbed his close eyelids, he could still see her eyes staring up him as he gripped the shoulders of her jacket. Questioning. Seeking. Pleading. In his brief glimpse of those turquoise irises, he could see the pain. The uncertainty. The fear.

He groaned aloud to the empty room and stood up. He had to get rid of that image.

* * *

"Subject is a female member of the lynx species. Subject is approximately eighteen years of age, and has not been cited for any noteworthy outstanding criminal charges. Subject-" 

"Ah, ROB," Peppy said, raising a hand, "Just skip ahead to the medical data."

"Acknowledged," the automaton replied, his monotonic voice emanating from an artificial voice box, "Subject suffered a dislocated left shoulder, severe loss of blood, moderate internal and severe external bruising, multiple external lacerations of multiple sizes, a minor concussion to the front portion of the brain, and minor structural damage to the right hand."

"Thanks ROB," the hare said, turning to the other occupants of the room.

All four members of the team were assembled in the relatively cramped space, gathered more or less around the single cot towards the back of the room. For a few moments, the only sounds in the confines of the sterile walls were the quiet, slightly labored breathing of the cot's occupant, and the occasional retort of a medical machine.

When Fox first entered the room, he barely recognized the pilot. In the process of administering whatever medical help the _Great Fox's_ comparatively meager supplies could offer, her stained helmet and goggles had been removed, as well as her blood smeared flight suit. A pair of faded green pants remained from her original clothing, and it appeared that Peppy had acquired a black T-shirt from somewhere to preserve the pilot's modesty while her flight suit underwent stain removal.

A series of transfusion tubes and status wires were hooked up to various spots around her body, forming a web of medical cable. Bandages covered her right palm and a few other places where necessary, and by the looks of the wastebasket nearby, they had been changed multiple times already.

"So how's she doing Peppy?" Slippy asked timidly, kneading his hands together in a nervous habit and completely forgetting that ROB had just given a detailed answer to his very question.

"Well," he responded, scratching his chin, "According to ROB, and my own observations, she should be able to safely stay awake for short periods by the end of the day, and after that…we take it one step at a time. We have another couple of days until we reach Corneria, so until we can get there and drop her and, well, what's left of her ship off, she's our guest."

"…Our disabled, non-interactive, unconscious, guest," Falco added.

Peppy sighed at the avian's apparent lack of compassion, "…Yes, Falco, in a very blunt manner of speaking."

"Did she have any ID on her?" Fox asked.

"We couldn't find anything _on _her," the hare responded, shrugging, "And anything in the computer on her fighter's probably fried. Once we get to Corneria, I'll send a request to the government's galactic directory. We should get _some_thing that way."

Fox nodded in assent, and Peppy looked around at the rest of the crew. Seeing a look of indifference from Falco, and the blank, introverted stare of Slippy, hinting at the tidal wave of thought flowing in the toad's mind, the hare turned back towards the team's automaton and temporary medic.

"Immediate status, ROB?" he asked.

The metallic head whirred and turned towards the team. "Subject is stable in all areas of physical health, with minor fluctuations in brain neurological activity. No substantial abnormalities. Status green."

Peppy was already following the rest of the crew out the door of the small medical room when he turned his head back, speaking over his shoulder to the decently worn and aged robot, "Let us know if anything changes."

"Affirmative."

* * *

Fleet Captain Hartford rushed through the faded gray hallways of the massive Cornerian Dreadnaught _Midnight Howl_, panting and breathing quick and light as he rounded corners and dodged other officers as they traversed the corridors. Some frowned, and others laughed as he passed, but he just kept charging. His promotion to commander of the nearby cruiser_ Broadsword _was a recent affair, and the last thing he wanted to do was to show up late to the first campaign planning session he had been invited to. The pitter-patter of his boots on the metal deck bounced around the bright, ashen halls of the _Howl _as he ducked and turned tightly in another intersection. 

This was the last time he'd rely on an alarm clock to get him up.

His species' characteristically bushy tail rode the wind and his youthfully gray fur brushed back from the speed. The husky glanced down at his wrist-chrono and neatly sidestepped a couple of lieutenants from the Dreadnaught's starfighter command. Maybe if he timed it just right…

The door to the planning room loomed just ahead as he rounded another corner, every step bringing him closer, but every second working against him. A guard that stood next to the door saw Hartford approaching and gauged his situation from the speed at which the husky ran. The sentry quickly consulted his holo-clipboard to ensure the officer's identity, pulled his own ID card from his belt, and swiped it over the preliminary security scanner, opening the door and allowing the Admiral to slip in without halting his swift gait.

Hartford whispered a 'thank you' as he entered the darkened room and stopped curtly once inside, hoping that he could slow down his heart rate before anyone noticed his breathlessness.

Thanks to the dim lights of the smallish room though, he managed it. He approached a broad table in the middle of the chamber at a more casual rate, the viewers around it either acknowledging his presence with a polite nod or keeping their focus on the holographic projections before them. The table provided the majority of the light in the room, casting colored reflections onto the faces of the other officers. Sighing from relief that he seemed to have made it on time, he was able to glance down at the holoprojector for only a moment before a deep, gravely voice caught everyone's attention.

"Alright. Now that everyone is present," the speaker began, glancing at Hartford, who cowered slightly in posture from the older man, "…We can begin the briefing."

As the speaker went through a series of preliminary items on an agenda, the husky officer leaned towards another one of the younger commanders, lowering his voice to a bare whisper, "Was I late? I thought the briefing was at oh-eight-hundred."

The hare leaned in as well, whispering sideways with a smirk and not taking his eyes off the speaking High Admiral, "It was. Everyone else was just early."

* * *

The rec room – or what was considered the recreation room onboard the cash-strapped _Great Fox_ – was abuzz with the ambient sounds of a good yarn: sporadic bursts of laughter, occasional inquiring questions, and good-natured ribbing from the narrator's audience. Despite the utter lack of 'entertaining' devices in the comfortable, if slightly bare, room, Fox and his friends always managed to strike up a good time. 

A variety of trophies and trinkets adorned the shelves and tables of the gunmetal gray room, souvenirs of past contracts and experiences. Constituting the sole luxury of the chamber, a wide data screen covered a large portion of one wall, giving the recreation area a second purpose as the team's unofficial pre-mission room. Occupying the center of the room was a cluster of comfortable chairs and a few small tables arrayed in a rough three-quarters circle.

Now, at Peppy and Slippy's behest, Falco was recalling the entire span of events that occurred from the outset of the mission to its less than desirable end, with Fox filling in a few key parts that the avian had exaggerated or omitted all together. His sweeping hand gestures and overemphasis on descriptive words were enough to put a smile on the rest of the team's faces, without even hearing what he was saying.

"…So after I presented my side of the argument," Falco explained, pointing with his thumb towards Fox, "This rebel over here decides to boost off towards whatever the hell the distress call was. You'd have though he was Slippy going after a _Lylatian Mechanics Monthly _or something." This drew a smile from the toad as Falco went on, describing his own heroic deeds in the ensuing skirmish with the scavengers.

It wasn't until he got to a certain point in the story that Peppy began showing particular interest though.

"And this guy just barrels toward old Foxie and that hunk of metal we have in the hanger right now, blasting away at his unshielded backside like there's no tomorrow. Which there wouldn't have been, if _I_ hadn't swooped in behind the bandit and _blasted _the sucker right out of existence. Brilliant marksmanship on my part if I do say so myself."

"Which, you do," Fox added with a smirk, clapping his friend on the back.

"Which, I do," Falco admitted, grinning and holding his hands up and to the side, as if in resignation of his own incredible skill.

Everyone had a good laugh at that. But as it quieted down, Peppy placed his chin between his thumb and forefingers, clearly pondering about something Falco had said. While Slippy engaged the bird in excited conversation over some other details of the mission, Fox noticed the thoughtful expression on the hare's face and slid his chair a little closer, asking at a lower voice, so as not to impede on the other discussion in the room, what was the matter.

"Hm? Oh, nothing," the elder responded, shaking his head. Clearly though, there was something, and Fox suddenly felt uneasy as he had ideas of what it could be. Sure enough, a few minutes later, while Falco and Slippy were still talking away, their discussion having turned to the screw-ups the toad would've committed had he been in the avian's place during the mission, Peppy nodded towards Fox and spoke again. "Can I see you in the hanger for a second?"

The vulpine sighed and nodded, having expected the request and knowing where it would lead. He stood up and left with the hare, leaving his other teammates to continue their argument. Fox managed to catch the last lines of the exchange as the rec room doors slid shut.

"…all I'm saying is that at some point during the battle, you would've been all like, '_Fooooox_' or something."

* * *

The hanger was empty. 

A vulpine stood in the center of the large docking bay. He was surrounded by a quartet of Arwings and a recently arrived carcass of a fighter with the cockpit smashed open and the pieces still on the ground. Angry footsteps from a former inhabitant of the hanger still echoed off the dull gray walls, the source of the footfalls having left only moments ago.

But the hanger just _felt_ empty.

Fox stared at the starboard laser cannon on the Arwing directly in front of him. He stared it at as though the twisted barrel of melted and melded steel and forged alloy would say something to him. He stared. And stared. And stared. But the cannon remained silent. Unlike the hare who just left, the piece of equipment refused to speak up.

It hadn't been the first time Peppy had chewed Fox out for his performance, or lack thereof, on an assignment. And it probably wouldn't be the last, either. It seemed like after any mission during which damage had been sustained to the vulpine's fighter, he got reprimanded heavily. He had learned to grow callous to the accusations of recklessness and irresponsibility after the first few times, but Fox still couldn't get over the stinging guilt that was always seeded in his gut.

It went beyond the cost of the repairs and spare parts that would inevitably be tallied as a result of his decision to put himself in death's flight course. It went further beyond the fact that Fox's mercenary unit was already incredibly strapped for cash, and that they could barely afford the supplies and operating costs to keep them working for the next month.

It was the father-son complex. Ever since Fox's father had died, a little before the Lylat War had broken out, Peppy had taken up in his deceased best friend's place and raised the orphaned son he left behind. For all intents and purposes, the hare _was _Fox's foster father, and even then, at that moment while he stood alone in the hanger, Fox had never regretted being Peppy's 'son' for an instant. He knew Peppy only came down hard on him because of worry for the young fox's safety.

And perhaps Fox deserved it. He _had _put himself in a position in which he could have been easily killed with nothing true to be gained. If that scavenger's aim had been a little better, Fox had no problem in concluding that he'd be either floating adrift and flashfrozen in the void, or vaporized by a scarlet red laser. Without Peppy there to rail his behavior every time he even tripped accidentally out of line, the vulpine would be dead by now.

"…_I just wish he wasn't so harsh sometimes…"_

Breathing heavy and deep, Fox shrugged his shoulders up high and let them sag down, shoving his paws in his vest pockets. He drooped his head and dropped his gaze to the floor. He couldn't escape the feeling that he was like a young pup who had just had his muzzle rubbed near a broken vase or some other childish misdeed. A sigh escaped his lips.

"…_Whatever…"_

Fox turned slowly and strode solemnly towards the hanger door and the hallway beyond. He needed something to get his mind off of what had transpired in the last fifteen minutes: he needed to shake the pit that had planted itself in his stomach. Ultimately, he needed to get the echoes of Peppy's coarse tirades out of his head.

As soon as he reached the lift at the end of the hallway, he punched in the floor of the _Great Fox _that housed the medical bay. Perhaps he could find some sort of distraction there.

* * *

Another big thank you to everyone who reviewed. 

GL and Artistic Tuba: I'm honestly very psyched that you guys like my story: muy gracias for the kind words.

Kavi: Hey! That review really meant a lot coming from a good friend; and you're right about that error too. Thanks Kav

RedBay: Hahah, woah; that's one intense review right there. I've definitely taken everything you've said into consideration though; especially a few chapters from now, you've caused me to go back and make some changes for the better. Many thanks dude

Sir Raphael: Nah, don't worry; no intrusion at all. I'm trying to keep the plot tied to the main characters early on though, so I don't really have a lot of opportunity for well-developed OCs at this point, but as soon as I need one (which shouldn't be more than three or four chapters from now), I'll let ya know.


	5. Chapter 5: Breifing

**V**: _Briefing_

"As you all know, the Warlord situation in Lylat is getting out of control. They are in command of enough war material that, while not comparable to Corneria's own fleets separated, would constitute a major threat if ever combined. The fact that the individual warlords despise each other too much to band together is the only thing saving us from a system-wide crisis."

The gathered upper echelon of Cornerian naval officers had taken their seats in a semicircle around the holoprojector, four seats deep with the highest level officers in front. The High Admiral stood in a slight depression in the projector table's far edge, allowing him to sign and gesture as needed to every feature of the floating hologram, as well as speak to the entire congregation at once. Representatives of all seven of Corneria's primary fleets were present, and the Admirals of four occupied the first row of chairs.

Fleet Captain Hartford, the youngest of the assembled officers, sat in the back with the other Commanders and Captains. The semicircular seating was set up in rough columns organized by fleet, meaning that every Admiral sat at the head of his or her wedge, with their immediate subordinates taking up the seats widening out from their superior.

In response to the High Admiral's opening lines, the holoprojector in the briefing table shifted from displays of logistics and text information, to a three dimensional holographic projection of the Lylat System. The bright, shifting ball of gas that was Sol, Lylat's star, sat in the middle, surrounded by the numerous planets and anomalies that made up the rest of the solar system. The representative globes and gas clouds of these heavenly bodies orbited the yellow star in accelerated real time.

"Most of these private commanders are former Venomian officers who refused to give up their holdings when Andross fell and the main body of his army surrendered. A few others are the leaders of organized criminal factions that have grown and flourished in the less patrolled areas of Lylat. Either way, they have all received a great boon from the end of the Lylat War, with fully half of the remaining Venomian fleet's vessels and fighters left unaccounted for at the time of their surrender. It's assumed that most of these vessels have made their way into these Warlords' fleets."

Now the holographic image of Lylat acquired a sprinkling of several small red pylons. There were a number of the symbols, arranged throughout the system in a pattern that suggested complete randomness. Small, single lines of text sprouted up next to the pylons, indicating the names of the Warlords they represented.

The elder lupine High Admiral reached forward and tapped the holographic pylon labeled 'Omaya' near a deep blue, cross-shaped gas formation, and it promptly faded from crimson to grey.

"Now, after a successful, if prolonged, operation against Warlord Omaya in Sector X, we've eliminated the largest of these private fleets and impounded his acquired assets. Many of the Admirals may notice several of the captured vessels are making their way into our own fleets after some time in drydock for refitting." The High Admiral suppressed a smile as he saw the suddenly brightened expressions of his immediate subordinates: regardless of where the vessels themselves came from, every high level commander loved to hear that their command was being expanded. "However, that still leaves a great deal of cleaning left to do."

He gestured towards the rest of the red pylons and continued, "The Cornerian Prime Minister has issued a decree recently in regards to this problem."

An aide stepped forward and hooked up a personal datapad she was holding to the holographic projector in the table. Taking a few moments to assure the quality of the connections, she then tapped a key on the pad and the image of the Lylat System abruptly faded. In its place, the head and shoulders of the Cornerian Leader appeared, frozen in mid-speech. Obviously, it was a previously recorded declaration that had been fast-forwarded to the pertinent section.

The aide pressed another key, and the frozen image came to life, the formally dressed retriever continuing his address to an unseen audience.

"…And these 'Warlords' that have disrupted the economic and social well-being of the entire Lylat System, and are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilian and military personnel, will not be allowed to roam unchecked any longer. As of this quarter, the Cornerian Military will be taking extreme measures to ensure that each and every one of these self-appointed commanders is neutralized, and that every one that seeks to turn him or herself in for asylum is protected. I've already spoken with High Admiral Markiss on this issue, and he had assured me that each and every Warlord will be thoroughly dealt with..."

The aide stopped the recording and the Prime Minister halted again, his image fading back to that of the Lylat System. Faint whispers and mutterings could be hear circulating the room in reaction to what the retriever had said, until the wolf in the solid black High Admiral's uniform raised his hands for silence, which he was promptly given. His aide unplugged the datapad from the projector and bowed, stepping out of the circle of light thrown off by the holographic images and back into the shadow of darkness.

"Now," the High Admiral Markiss began again, "In response, four of our seven fleets have been fully mobilized to deal with these threats." At these words, seven green diamonds materialized in orbit around Corneria's representation on the holographic map, numbered with their proper fleet designations. Four of the diamonds began to glow with a silver outline.

"Our intelligence efforts, aided by the governments of several other planets, have uncovered a great deal of information on the strength of each individual Warlord's fleet, and we've been able to funnel down our list of targets in the first phase of our operation."

Markiss pointed towards a pair of red pylons circling a small planet about midway between Zoness and Aquas, "Warlords Arkenth and Hylin seem content to dismantle each other for control of the temperate planet Ross, so we'll leave them to their own issues for now. The planet Ross has a very low population, and produces nothing of incredible value, so the Advisory Board for this operation sees no benefit to their liberation in this first phase." The two red pylons faded to a dull yellow as he finished explaining their roles, or lack thereof, in the coming operation.

Then he moved on to another crimson symbol in the sickly yellow gas formation of Sector Y, consulting a small screen on his own console, "Warlord Siona owns a string of space stations in and around the Sector Y nebula, as well as a small planetoid in the heart of it, but most of her bases are limited to economic or construction capabilities. She seems to prefer to concentrate her efforts on the political side of things, maintains only a small defensive fleet, and doesn't seem eager to expand any time soon, so she's out." Again, the pylon circling the gas formation faded to the same dull yellow.

"The most curious of the Warlords, O'Donnell, has been very quiet the past year since building his personal fleet. His warships are probably the fewest in number compared to the rest of the commanders, but we do know that he has made it a point to acquire only those with the proper skills, meaning that his small force is never to be underestimated."

A murmur ran through the briefing room at the mention of Wolf O'Donnell's name. The vast majority of the officers present had been in command positions during the Lylat War, and they had all read the operation reports of units that had encountered O'Donnell and his wingmen in combat. They were never positive. The mercenary and his flight of three had chalked up more Cornerian pilot kills than any Venomian fighter _battalion _could muster, let alone an equal squad of four. More so than any of Andross' destroyers or frigates, the presence of O'Donnell's trademark Wolfen fighters at a naval engagement struck fear into the hearts of the Cornerian single-ship jockeys being sent against them.

The High Admiral shrugged and continued, "However, as I said, he hasn't made any aggressive moves since settling on the lightly populated second moon of Fortuna. Several Cornerian patrols have swept through the area before we were aware of his presence, and they were never hassled. As long as we don't bother him, he should stay in place."

The pylon labeled "O'Donnell" faded to yellow as well, leaving a quartet of the pylons still blazing crimson in various portions of the system. Markiss leaned forward, indicating that this part of the briefing would be the most crucial.

"That leaves us with the four that we have deemed most likely to pose a threat to Lylat's immediate well being," he said, gesturing to the four remaining indicators and naming them off in turn. "Raymund, Ypson, Norwood, and Bauker. Pay attention my friends, because for the rest of this operation, these are your adversaries."

* * *

"Greetings Commander McCloud. Would you like an update as to subject lynx's status?" 

"No thanks ROB," Fox replied as he stepped into the tiny medical bay, prompting the automaton who acknowledged him to turn back to its work.

The double 'beep' of the unconscious pilot's vital signs monitors came steady and repeating, assuring the vulpine that he didn't need ROB's report to know that the lynx was in the green. True to the android's simplistic, programmed nature, the sheets of the cot and the various tubes and wires feeding into the pilot were arranged in pristine fashion, while the rest of the med room was as worn as ever. Fox shrugged though: as long as it was all functional.

The vulpine pulled up a chair a respectable distance from the cot and studied the pilot, noting with a raised eyebrow and a thoughtful posture the more drastic measures taken to ensure her health. A sling stretching around her left arm and anchored at the right shoulder. A web of heavy bandages laced around her right hand. An extremely extensive and intricately woven dressing that wrapped her torso in white linen, with blood absorbent pads lashed down in front and back. A generous sprinkling of small strips of bandage throughout the exposed parts of the body, not protected by the heavy vest she had worn. Literally capping it off was a bandage headband, placed with a smaller gauze pad in front, again to soak up any of the crimson fluid that escaped the gash in her forehead.

And despite all that, Fox noted, the lynx's facial expression was one of quiet serenity and peace. Her oxygen tube-assisted breathing, more of a safety precaution than a necessity, was regular and practically silent. Fox reached up from where he was sitting at the pilot's eye level in a chair and placed his own hand on her heavily bandaged right paw, resting on her stomach. Patting it a few times, he smiled: more so than any emotional connection he felt, the vulpine felt a bond of respect with the fellow starfighter pilot.

"Hang in there," he said in a half-whisper, moving to stand and leave, his curiosity fulfilled.

But as soon as he was fully upright, one of the medical monitors in a bank along the wall of the tiny med ward began to flood with neutral blue text, followed by another screen launching a burst of beeps. ROB's head snapped up from what he was doing and he quickly clomped to Fox's side, studying the active monitors.

"Subject's brainwave pattern is increasing," ROB said in a dry monotone, "Consciousness is expected to be regained momentarily." Then, snatching a preloaded syringe off of the counter in a smooth, pre-calculated move, the automaton continued, "Standard procedure is to administer a proper dose of Epsilon solution, followed by-"

"No no no, that's okay ROB," Fox stammered, jumping between the robot and the pilot, "Let her come around this time."

* * *

"And that leaves us with our final target: Warlord Bauker." 

The holographic projection had changed. It still showed the entire Lylat System, with all the crimson and faded out pylons in the same places as before. But now, each of the four symbols indicating an active Warlord was accompanied by one of the four selected green, numbered diamonds, representing a Cornerian Fleet assigned to the target.

All except one red pylon, which stood out in open space near the Sector Z gas cloud. Labeled 'Bauker', the map suddenly isolated the sector of space it inhabited and expanded it to fit the entire projector. Within a second, the green diamond labeled with the number seven came into view and took up residence right next to the name accompanying the red symbol. The meaning of this holographic occurrence became blatantly obvious once High Admiral Markiss continued.

"Our recently expanded Seventh Fleet will move to engage and neutralize Mr. Bauker's armada, last seen in Sector Z. However…there is a bit of a hitch with Warlord Bauker that we haven't encountered with the other Warlords. He moves. A lot."

High Admiral Markiss came around the holographic table to stand before it, between the assembled officers and the hologram. The lupine felt he would make for a better speaker if he could actually be seen, now that he didn't need to operate the projector and point out key maneuvers and operations as he had while briefing his subordinates on the other Warlords. Instead, holographic representations of various ships and key personnel in Bauker's personal army automatically scrolled down on in mid-air over the holographic table.

"While his fleet strength is nothing special, Joseph Bauker himself has the uncanny ability to be everywhere he needs to be, and nowhere _we _need him to be. He's mobile, and that means we don't have a particular base to tie him down to like our other targets."

"High Admiral Markiss, sir," a grey vulpine wearing the uniform of a Starfighter Commander seated in front of the studious Hartford began, waiting for the wolf's acknowledgment before standing and continuing with his inquiry, gesturing towards the statistics of Bauker's known spacecraft displayed on the projector. "Forgive my stating of the obvious sir, but with a battle group _that _size, wouldn't he need to have at least a minor base to repair and maintain his vessels?"

Markiss nodded, as if expecting the question, "Trust me Commander Rashik, I've spent much time thinking along those exact same lines, but our intelligence has shown that every station or planetside outpost he's stopped at has belonged to another faction entirely. Which brings up another point; he's got allies…"

* * *

As the briefing dragged on, Captain Hartford sighed and sat back from his note taking on the personal datapad in front of him. He wanted to show that he took his new promotion seriously and he knew the best way to do that was to pay close attention in briefings…but looking around, he saw how pointless note taking was. Everyone was given their own datacard with the briefing loaded on it when they left anyway. 

"_And it's not like anyone else is writing anything down…"_

"Hey," the hare seated next to Hartford whispered as he leaned over with arms crossed in a relaxed pose, the same hare that greeted the husky when he initially showed up to the briefing room, "Don't worry about that stuff; just sit back and pay attention."

Hartford blinked and looked at the hare for a second, momentarily not knowing what to make of the advice as he was pretty sure one wasn't supposed to talk during the mission explanation. As it registered in his mind though, the Fleet Captain smiled and nodded, whispering in response, "Thanks…um…"

"Bishop," the hare responded, smiling, "Commander Bishop. And don't mention it."

* * *

"Let her come around this time." 

The words echoed and were robbed of their bass and depth as they bounce around in her head, muffled and diminished to the point of doubt as to their reality. But before she could wonder _who _was speaking what she was hearing, she suddenly became aware of the fact that she _could _hear. It was an interesting sensation to say the least, abruptly being able to make out sound after being confined to her own subconscious musings for however long.

And just like that, she could think again too. Self awareness flooded back into her previously dormant conscious mind in a torrent of sensory input and mental output. She could process the level and pitch of her body and determine she was lying down. She could feel the sheets and light clothes and conclude that she was somewhere comfortable. Finally, the lynx could smell the distinct odor of sterility and cleansing agents, and establish that she was somewhere safe.

All of this before she had even cracked her aching, throbbing eyes.

She was immediately greeted with an unrelenting burst of light as her raw, previously dormant optical nerves clicked on and struggled to adjust to the relatively bright exterior. In response, her eyelids automatically slipped to slits, accompanied by a sharp inhale as her body recovered from the temporary blindness. Another byproduct, she noted, was that she could feel the recycled air of wherever she was rush into her lungs, spreading relief at a basic, nutrient-based level through every cell in her body.

She gathered her strength, and gave trying to gain a visual understanding of her surroundings another shot.

As the scathing white light slowly subsided, and her pupils gradually allowed themselves to expand and drink in more of her surroundings, she took note of everything she could make out. A dull grey ceiling. A translucent medical fluid-drip system on a stand. A deactivated overhead lamp and tool rack. A smiling, orange and rust colored vulpine. A softly glowing light source built into a ceiling panel. A…

"…_Wha…what?"_

More words. Maybe her hearing wasn't completely correct yet; there was a detectable delay from her realizing someone was speaking and the words actually making sense in her mind.

"Hey there…welcome back."

She blinked. Exerting no small amount of energy, she tilted her head to the side ever so slightly, allowing her a better image of the speaker. Her efforts were rewarded with another welcoming grin, but despite the contagiousness of the expression, she refused to match it, both out of a physical inability to do so at the time, and because it was something she didn't normally enjoy.

A sudden, involuntary shudder ran through her body as she tried to tighten the correct muscles for a questioning look. Abruptly becoming aware of how incredibly sore and tired her body was, the lynx's neutral stare faded quickly into a dull expression of pain and exhaustion. She tried to stretch to relieve the rigidity of her tendons and ligaments, but they refused to budge. The fox must've noticed her distress, as his smile inverted into a frown of concern.

Her veins were on fire. The burning of shear ache and pain from the chemicals rushing through her bloodstream threatened to overwhelm her fragile consciousness if it continued much longer. She did her best not to show any sign of weakness or frailty, but her hands refused to stay still, and shook as though electricity was being pumped through the pair of medical tubes connected to them. And yet she still couldn't muster up a single form of communication to the fox, who had just moved out of her view.

And then, as abruptly as it had started, the burning subsided and dissipated into a dull, throbbing sting. It still taxed her weakened tolerance levels, but it was survivable. Just as the orange-furred fox retook his seat, coming back into view from above her relative view of the room, a cool, soothing liquid seemed to take the chemical's place, although she knew it was probably more artificial fluid. Whatever it was, it was clear that the vulpine had done it.

The bed-ridden lynx wished he would back off a bit. It suggested that either he was a close friend, which was certainly out, or that she was more heavily injured than she realized and required close attention. Either way, it made her uncomfortable. She tried once again to morph her features into a questioning glance with a hint of contempt, but her resulting expression only managed to achieve the former quality. Her apparent host picked up on it immediately, again reassuming that annoying smile of his and leaning slightly closer to speak.

"You're probably wondering where you are," he began, prompting the lynx to very badly want to roll her eyes at the obviousness of the statement. Still, that he mouthed the word 'wow' to himself and shook his head a bit while still maintaining his smile showed that he saw the blatancy of the comment too.

"_At least he's not a _total _slag-wit," _she thought, noticing that she could hear herself and the speaker surprisingly well.

"I uh…lemme start again," he stammered, laughing lightly, "You're in the…well, what passes as the med ward on the _Great Fox_. My crew and I are mercenaries. We found you a while ago out near the Briar Pocket in the Meteos field while flying a contract in the area. Your ship was pretty torn up when we came across it."

It was a fairly barebones explanation, but the lynx didn't even hear enough to care after perceiving the words 'Briar Pocket'. Like a flood, the previously dormant memories of the moments and events that occurred leading up to when she was rammed head-on by one of the enemy escorts' fighters on her failed mission poured back into her mind.

She remembered the approach to the target, hanging there in the Briar Pocket's void, and how everyone in the strike group had been eager and excited to bust up the lightly escorted convoy and score some bonus pay for kills. Her initial hesitation at being one of only a pair of interceptors to guide the quartet bombers faded once she saw that the convoy had only hired the same number of bodyguards for protection. Instead, a ravenous need to prove her skills to the flight leader, who happened to be in the other interceptor, overtook her thoughts.

And then, she remembered the two sides meeting. Those blue and white fighters that the freighter convoy had hired were nothing short of demonic in how they fought. They had danced and slipped in perfect tandem around her like they could see her flight group's maneuvers ahead of time. In her recollection, she saw herself literally shaking in her command chair as two of her group's bombers exploded barely before she could get a bead on one of the escorts. She still remembered their screams of surprise and confusion as they echoed over the com.

She hadn't necessarily felt bad for the two unfortunate pilots; she knew never to get attached to the other fighter jockeys in the smuggling syndicate that hired her. They never lasted too long. Rather it was the sheer speed in which they and a subsequent third pilot met their demise. She shook because she knew she was in the line of fire of those blue and white fighters.

Then, right there at the end, when her flight leader gave the order to bug out and regroup deeper in the greater Meteos field, she remembered defying him and going in for another run on the lead escort. The lynx had yet to figure out why. She got several shots in on the enemy fighter, which gave her a boost of confidence, and she even managed to convince herself that she could take him down. He wasn't invincible. Nobody was.

Then, she remembered the blue and white fighter lining up for a head-on charge against her own. She remembered how she was certain that he would flinch and turn away at the last second. She remembered a slight twinge of doubt as they approached each other, his course not deviating a meter from straight on.. She remembered at the last second realizing that she hadn't readjusted her shields to the front to better absorb the blow.

She didn't remember anything after that.

Back in her cot on some strange ship with a rusty-orange vulpine watching her, a single spasm racked her body, contracting her muscles and popping them back again. Medical machines started to beep faster and louder, and a serious looking android abruptly appeared next to the worried fox. Both of them checked a few monitors out of the lynx's line of sight.

"Subject is loosing stability," the robot's metallic voice rumbled out, "Recommend initiation drip of Epsilon solution."

"Wait."

Her voice was more of a croak, escaping her dry and parched throat by exertions unknown. But it was clear enough, and surprising enough, to freeze the vulpine in his tracks, his arm suspended with an IV bag of the proper fluid poised to be given to the android and his mouth hanging open. His eyes were wide.

"Who…are you?"

She could feel herself fading out. The sweet, numbing darkness was creeping around the perimeter of her vision. But just before she lost consciousness again, in a much softer and controlled way than the first time, a final thought crossed her mind as it shut down. The lynx couldn't have heard the vulpine right. It just wasn't possible.

"…_did that fox…say his name was…Fox?"_


	6. Chapter 6: Fortnight

VI Fortnight

* * *

The _Great Fox _was on stilts.

At least, that's what it looked like to the casual observer in Corneria City's New Memories Spaceport. A series of strong, several meter thick durasteel braces jutted up from the ground of the hanger and latched onto the capital ship's exterior, holding it up off the deck just enough to keep the _Great Fox_'s own docking bay a few meters from ground level. It was as though the ship had landed in a forest of metal trees.

The public hanger was keep relatively clean for its cavernous size; the particular wing Starfox's command ship had set down in was circular in shape, with a variety of neighboring ships of every sort. A shallow dome stretched over top of the spaceport facility, parting every twenty or so minutes to allow a ship to pass in or out of its confines. The gears and mechanisms for this action were kept surprisingly well; for its mass, the hanger ceiling moved very smoothly and quietly, so that one scarcely noticed its actions.

A ramp extended upward from the hanger's deck to meet the open bay of the _Great Fox_, allowing quick access to the lowest level of the mercenary vessel from the spaceport. Parked at the bottom of the ramp was a boxy vehicle, flashing the green, strobing lights of a Cornerian ambulance. It had arrived only moments before, disgorging a pair of medical personnel, and was now awaiting their return, eager to whisk them and their charge off to a nearby hospital. Within the idle Great Fox, the two dispatched nurses were just finishing the secure transfer of a fairly heavily injured lynx to the hover-gurney they had brought along, strapping her in tight, despite her helpless physical condition.

One medical tech tightened a strap that ran across the lynx's arm, careful to allow the supportive sling that inhibited the same limb to go untouched. Nodding at his work when he was through, he turned to his partner and motioned for the fellow nurse to take the hover-stretcher off its park function. She complied, and the procession of medics pushing the gurney, followed by Fox and Peppy, cleared the med ward and headed for the _Great Fox_'s elevators at the end of the hallway.

Fox felt content as he followed the others. As small as an accomplishment as it might've seemed to someone else, he had managed to finally silence that little nagging voice in the back of his mind that had been badgering him since becoming a mercenary. He had done something relatively noble for someone, and had not received any monetary compensation for it. As a matter of a fact, it would probably _cost _the group a chunk of credits to repair his damaged fighter. But he was happy.

The elevator doors closed, cutting the procession off from their view of the hallway they had just crossed, and begin its descent to the bottom floor of the _Great Fox_. The four conscious passengers stood more or less still in the silence, as none of them really wanted to strike up any small talk. They were going to split at docking bay, and all the necessary information had already been exchanged from orbit anyway.

Fox was suddenly aware of a faint rustling as the lift slowed its velocity as it neared its destination. Glancing down at the hover-stretcher between the medical techs, he noticed that, despite whatever presumably anesthetic fluid was dripping from an IV bag held by one of the medics, the lynx was beginning to stir. The lead nurse noticed it too, but looked up and matched the vulpine's questioning look with a slight shake of the head, wordlessly telling him that the patient's movement wasn't anything out of the ordinary.

The lift doors parted, opening up the reveal the corridor to the _Great Fox_'s hanger.

* * *

"_This is getting kinda annoying."_

Again she had awoken from unconsciousness, and again she was in a strange place with complete strangers that she didn't recognize.

"_Not that there're a whole lot of people out there that I _would _recognize…"_

Ignoring her initial confusion though, the lynx got down to taking in the details of wherever she was once again. And right away, her basic observations weren't reassuring.

She was moving; from what she could see through the covert slits she narrowed her eyes to, she was being pushed along a slowly passing hallway by a medical technician, judging by the generic, system-wide uniform he was wearing. She was lying down on what she assumed to be a gurney of some sort, connecting the medic above her with what she remembered learning of her heavily injured state during her brief first awakening however long ago. The same dull grey of the corridor ceiling she was staring up at told her she was probably still on the same ship she had woken up on before, although she had no sense of time to tell her how long ago that might've been.

Most disconcerting though, was that she was strapped down; the bands dug slightly through her fur into her skin. The extreme sense of helplessness that stemmed from this realization wasn't a feeling that she particularly relished. It meant that moving was too big a danger to risk, so she had to be protected from herself and any unconscious spasms she might slip into. What it meant to her thoroughly conscious mind though, was that she could only depend on others to do what they thought was right to help her, and that any resistance she put up would be futile.

"_Great," _she thought, mentally dragging out the word, _"'Cuz that's exactly what I need right now."_

The gurney she was on hovered seamlessly over the tiny lip of another doorway, and suddenly the hallway ceiling opened up into a comparatively massive room, which she took to be the docking bay for whatever ship she was on. A natural curiosity briefly took over and she wished she could see what kind of personal vessels and fightercraft occupied the hanger, but she suppressed the urge to look around and give her being conscious away. As much as she hated being strapped down to a stretcher, she hated even more the idea of being drugged into forced unconsciousness.

Another figure moved into her peripheral vision, to the side of the stretcher. This one she recognized; it was the rusty-orange vulpine from before. The one that had been 'comforting' her when she awoke for the first time in the ship's medical ward. The lynx bit back another urge, this one to growl in derision.

"…_What was that bulkhead's name again?" _she questioned herself, knowing that the fox had told her before, but the answer seemed to elude her grasp at the moment.

Then, abruptly, her mental musings stopped as a new sight came into her limited field of vision.

They were passing close to the folded-back wing of a fighter, white and blue in color and looking as though it had suffered quite a bit of battle damage. Even from her very limited scope of sight, the lynx could see the scars and wounds it had managed to withstand. One particularly long scorch stretched the length of the underside of the wing, from tip to the connecting point with the rest of hull.

She recognized that wing.

Perhaps it was a latent memory that her mind just randomly triggered, but she suddenly saw a crystal clear image of the wing she was passing by in another setting. This time the wing, and the blue and white fighter attached to it, were mere meters away from her, coming straight at her from the background of space and asteroids. Gone were the images of the blue and white fighters that had come to rescue her from the scavengers. Instead, those images were replaced with the single shot of the same exact fighter bearing down on her, ready to collide with her head on.

And, again perhaps as a result of some bit of brain damage, in her mind's eye, she swore she could make out an orange-furred vulpine at the controls of the suicidal snubfighter.

"…He _did this_," she thought, feeling her heart begin to beat faster with rage, "_…He caused all this…he…did this to me."_

Just as her mind dawned on this all-important fact, the fox turned and looked at her, giving her a smile, almost as though he knew she had just realized what he did. That smile of his had just stepped beyond mere annoyance; it was insulting.

A rage swept through her, sped up by the chemicals rushing through her bloodstream and unhampered by any mental tempering that should've normally taken place. She flexed her arms as much as she could, not bothering to be covert anymore, but stopped as a sudden, searing pain screamed through her nervous system. The pilot had failed to realize that her left arm was in a sling, and that by flexing it and attempting to move it, she had unwittingly loosed the fragile supports that had kept her shoulder in place until it could be properly set.

The pain was numbing in the worst way, shooting through her threshold for anguish and overloading her mind until she suddenly lost all feeling in her arm. Which served her just as well; it allowed her to concentrate all her might on her right limb, unhampered by any significant pain when she tested it against the straps holding it down. The material cracked and loosened as she strained against it, finally relenting enough to slip her wrist out from beneath it.

But before she had a chance to register that she was free, she felt a tiny prick, almost insignificant compared to the pain of dislocating her shoulder for a second time a few seconds ago, on the side of her neck. From the point of insertion, she could feel a cool, soothing fluid spreading, slowly but surely numbing the muscles and tendons it came in contact with.

With her free hand though, she reached meagerly towards the fox, who had since contorted his face in surprised concern and moved closer to the stretcher. The hand, bandaged and broken inside, shook as she struggled to hold it up, seeking ultimately to place it around that disgustingly orange neck.

The numbness spread up her neck muscles.

Completely misunderstanding the gesture, and causing a renewed burst of fury within the lynx, the vulpine stepped closer again and took the outstretched hand in both of his own, applying the slightest bit of pressure in a comforting manner.

She suddenly couldn't hear. Her eyelids began to slacken.

"_N-no…you bast…bas…"_

The fluid finally reached her brain, seeping inside and gently shutting it down.

* * *

"…And in military news, the Cornerian Second, Third, Fifth, and Seventh fleets have been deployed in a recent action aimed to stem the spread of recent, hostile, Warlord activity. For the security of the men and women of our armed forces, we cannot give out any specific information other than that, but we have been able to get High Admiral Markiss' comments on the deployment." 

"He said, quote, 'Coinciding with the Prime Minister's recent informal Declaration of War on the known Warlords of the Lylat System, we have been in the process of planning and preparing to move against them. If they won't disarm themselves, it's our job to give them a hand to do so,' end quote."

"With updates every hour on the hour, this is the Cornerian News Corporation, serving the citizens of Corneria since…"

* * *

Nurse Welsh considered the various medications arranged neatly on the tray she was bracing with one hand against her hip. 

"_Insta-Marrow for accelerated bone repair and regrowth, low-dosage Epsilon Solution for pain-killing and comfort, Hemo-stimulants for blood regeneration…"_

Everything was present, just as it should be. The pleasantly aging hare adjusted one of the sealed, cylindrical containers that had fallen on its side as the lift she was riding came to a stop. Righting it and nudging the tiny bottle back in line with its comrades, she smiled at the perfect layout of medication it completed.

"_If only the patients could be as easy to cooperate with," _she couldn't help but think as she exited the elevator into a bustling hospital hallway.

She slipped into the stream of other nurses and doctors as they strode from destination to destination, one of them occasionally stopping at one of the many doors to visit a patient. The hospital wasn't the largest in Corneria City, nor was it the most well known, but the staff there prided themselves in establishing relationships with their clients. But as Nurse Welsh carried the tray of medications down a less-traversed side corridor, she considered the patient she was about to bring them to.

Her smile faded slightly as she closed in on the room labeled with the correct number. Within was a patient that the other nurses had brought up countless times in casual conversation down in the cafeteria, none of them for delightful behavior or a sweet disposition. Instead, Nurse Welsh had heard nothing but horror stories of contempt and rudeness, both quiet and expressed, since the patient had been received two weeks ago.

The lynx had been pretty banged up by something, but the mercenaries who found her refused to say anything about how. Which was typical of those types: always valuing their mystery and privacy. It was only during the last few days though, when the subject had at last regained enough strength and stamina to get up and walk around, that the nurse had been actually nervous when entering bringing the patient her medication. She didn't really expect the young lynx to try anything irrational, but given the subject's attitude towards the medical staff of the hospital, the feeling that it was even possible was unpleasant.

Nurse Welsh paused in front of the plain wooden door and knocked. Not receiving any response telling her to stay out, she parted the door about in inch and spoke through the opening.

"Good morning er, ma'am," she began, realizing just as she was saying it that the lynx had never given her name to anyone, "I've brought some medications from Doctor Luyik. I think you should…"

She stopped, suspecting something was wrong. Even for the normally silent and glaring lynx, the complete lack of movement wasn't normal.

The Nurse pushed the door all the way open, revealing the small hospital room in its entirety. Her aged but sharp eyes swept over the contents of the room, focusing first on the empty bed, the leaking IV drip, the gently swaying curtains over the open window, the…

Nurse Welsh dropped the tray of pill containers, several of them breaking open on the floor and sending their contents skittering across the tile. Even before she put two and two together, she slapped the wallcom out of a gut instinct telling her something was wrong. It was just as she began to speak that she realized that they were on the tenth floor of the hospital: an escape through the windows would've been suicide.

A firm but not ungentle grip to the back of her neck and a foreign hand over her mouth prevented her from saying anything in return to the questioning doctor on the other side of the wallcom connection.

* * *

The old hare was lying silently in the corner of the room, covered in a pair of sheets taken from the empty cot. It wasn't so much to hide the nurse; rather, it was to prevent anyone from initially seeing that she was missing her nurse's uniform and cap. The few seconds it would take to realize that there was a false nurse somewhere on the hospital grounds might mean all the difference. 

The lynx bent down and collected the spilled plastic containers from the floor, analyzing them for the ones that she knew she would need to keep her strength up until she could make good her escape. Spotting a bottle labeled 'bio-stimulant,' she crunched a pair of the tablets in her mouth and pocketed the rest in the green casual trousers she still wore beneath her acquired disguise. The remaining containers she piled on top of the fallen tray. It'd make things more authentic.

Checking the small wall-mounted mirror to ensure the uniform fit convincingly, she noticed gladly that the sky blue cap conveniently hid the medicated bandage that had been wrapped around her head. Satisfied, she checked what had felt like her prison for the last two weeks once more, and left the room. Closing the door behind her and silently wishing the incapacitated nurse a good night's sleep with a grin, the young lynx strode into the hallway with only the barest of limps.

With medical clearance keycard in hand, she suddenly felt a kick of energy. Whether from knowledge of her escape or from the artificial stimulants, she didn't know, but she didn't much care either. She was free.

* * *

Nobody saw him. 

The dirty, rag-clad vulpine was shambling slowly down the torn and chipped sidewalk, in plain sight, but nobody saw him. He was a common sight; similar to a fire hydrant or streetlight. Everyone knew that they were there, but their presence had become ordinary and casual. And when you had enough experience in the more rundown portions of Corneria City, streetlamps, graffiti, weapons, homeless: they all became part of the background setting.

He looked up at the night sky, diluted by the light pollution of the city that surrounded him, and growled quietly. His fur, easily seen to be at one time proudly kept a unique rusted color, was matted with dirt and sludge, mixing with his natural hue to create an end result that bore a close resemblance to some of the rarest material in the urban landscape: soil. A large, ultra-sized overcoat was draped over his worn shoulders, and was in a similar condition to his fur beneath. If nothing else, both the fox and his articles of clothing, in reflection of the city blocks around him, could be said to have seen much, much better days.

The vagrant stood across the street from an abandoned warehouse, a fairly common type of building in the former industrial district. He was tucked neatly into an alley with a good view of the entrance to the building, but he continued to scan the streets instead, intent on finding a certain individual amongst the extremely light foot traffic. However, all he had managed to locate so far were a handful of other lost beings like himself, wondering aimlessly.

He was about to return to his ratty old fibacarb box when a new sight abruptly greeted him. On the steps of the old warehouse across the street was a trio of men. Two of them, nearly identical in their above average size and height, were dressed similar to the way he was, opening the possibility that they might be vagabonds as well. However, the vulpine noticed something strange about their behavior, which, considering their guises as traditionally eccentric drifters, was saying something.

They stood upright on the steps of the front entrance to the warehouse. They stood firmly and with presence. Most importantly, they stood with hands in their cloaks, probably resting on a weapon of some kind judging from their posture.

Looking past them though, the grimy vulpine made out a retriever, considerably better dressed than his two bodyguards, and quite a bit smaller in stature. He carried a nondescript black briefcase in one hand, and a shiny, expensive looking pistol in the other. Nodding once to one of his faux-homeless guards and saying something the fox couldn't hope to hear, he ascended the last of the small staircase and slipped through the door into the warehouse.

* * *

"Ah, Mr. Zertha, so good of you to come."

The well-dressed retriever eased the door shut behind him and turned around, facing the interior of the warehouse. He was at the edge of the single largish room, with racks of old, worthless equipment and support posts dotting the interior floor. Completely cut off from his bodyguards if he needed quick support, Zertha should've felt a twinge of fear when the echoing voice emerged from one of the countless shadows shading the warehouse floor, but he recognized the speaker. It wasn't the first time he'd done business with this particular shadow.

Another being stepped out from behind a support pillar to his right, feline by the silhouette, and spread his arms wide, indicating his harmlessness. Zertha had made deals with the man enough times to trust him, but the feline still decided a show of pacifism was necessary. In return, Zertha pocketed the pistol in his hand, and began to approach the man. Again, knowing his shady business partner, he automatically assumed the feline would have a pair of his own men hidden somewhere in the warehouse, covering his every move.

Indicating to a table that looked as old as the chipping paint on the warehouse walls, the feline directed Zertha to place the briefcase on the desk. The retriever complied, popping the locks on it and opening the case up for the man standing directly across from him to see.

"Fifteen thousand," Zertha said, his voice calm as he summed up the case's credit content, "I trust you brought the firearms?"

The feline grinned, his teeth sparkling in the very limited light, and nodded, gesturing towards a nondescript box on a nearby cobwebbed rack.

However, before Zertha could follow his hand, a muffled voice caught both their attention and they snapped to look at the warehouse's closed front door. An argument could clearly be heard escalating on the other side of it, and one side could clearly be made out as being one of the retriever's bodyguards.

"Get _away_ from me ya homeless bugga'; what the 'ell do you think you're doing?!"

"Just some change sirs…a spare credit if-" an unknown voice came through the door, meager and humble as it got cut off.

"I told you to back off buddy; you don't want this to get ugly, do ya?"

This was followed by a silence as the vagrant that had been presumably bothering Zertha's bodyguards out front apparently obeyed and backed off. Zertha and the feline looked back towards each other, both assuming that to be the end of that, and were just about to continue their negotiations when the quiet on the other side of the front door was replaced with a sharp and definite 'thud,' followed by several muffled slaps and thumps, indicating quite plainly a brief physical altercation.

An unidentifiable cry of pain followed immediately after the sounds stopped, and Zertha's hand automatically reached for his pistol, fishing it ungracefully out of his pocket and training it on the front door of the warehouse. A 'click' from across the table told him that the feline was doing the same as he cocked his own, previously hidden, handgun.

They waited in strained stillness as the hush that continued after the initial stifled shriek stretched on for another few seconds. Zetha was positive that his business partner was able to hear his pounding hear from across the table. Then, with a heavy iron clang that echoed through the warehouse, the metal front door was kicked open, casting faint light from the outside streetlamps in a tapering corridor on the interior's floor. A shadow stepped into the light, casting a silhouette that could be seen, although the door itself, having swung inward and to the right, prevented any direct sight of the intruder.

Zertha flinched as he realized that the shadow in the doorway wasn't one of his bodyguards, and he took a step back, cursing as he did so.

His footstep echoed in the silence. He had just given away his position.

* * *

The vagrant's mud-caked ears perked when he heard a faint footfall off to his right, placing his target somewhere behind the metal door that currently blocked his view of that direction. Knowing where his enemy was didn't do him much good though; the retriever and anyone else could easily see him due to his shadow in the doorway, and he couldn't move from the doorway because anyone with a weapon would shoot as soon as he left the cover of the metal door.

Shrugging, the vagabond stepped back a meter and bent down to grab a pistol from one of the unmoving guards, reckoning that the unconscious being probably wouldn't be needing it anytime soon. Switching the gun to his left paw, he reached under his own cloak and unholstered a second handgun, this one evidently a bit more personal to the homeless fox, as he gripped it with his right, more accurate, hand. Stepping back into the doorway and turning again to face the door, he took a breath.

He crossed his left arm over his right, took aim, and fired a single round at his target across the street in the complete opposite direction of the interior of the warehouse. The bullet traveled straight and true, zipping across the street faster than the naked eye could track. The din of shattering glass let him know he connected, and the faint light of the streetlamp that gave his position away to whoever was in the warehouse abruptly died. Without missing a beat, and now safely enshrouded in relative darkness, the fox dashed out from behind the metal door.

Strafing left in a gunslinger's crouch, he got several shots off with his left-hand pistol before beginning to receive any return fire, but it was aimed hastily and went wide. Bits of concrete and metal pinged around the far wall behind him as the fox made for a nearby support pillar, seeking refuge in the sturdy construction. Reaching it with a final surge of speed, he spun around and placed his back to the cement column, and took stock of the situation.

He had received fire from two sources, that was obvious, and his suppressing fire had failed to silence either of them. His was still too far to use his right, personal pistol's specialized ammunition, so that left him with about half a clip of ammunition in his borrowed left hand weapon. Against a pair of adversaries, that wasn't good odds by any stretch. Several 'at least' situations ran through the fox's head as he tried not to concentrate on the negative.

Then things went from bad to worse.

"Boris! Jacob!" a voice boomed, not even bothering to attempt to be covert, "He's behind the pillar by the entrance. Flank him and flush him out."

Two gruff affirmatives came from further in the warehouse, bringing the tally of enemies up to four in the fox's mind, and suddenly the repeating retort of a sub-machine gun _thwap_ed into the pillar the vulpine was using as cover, chewing away the concrete in chunks. Somehow, above the din of the suppressing assault, he could've sworn he heard rapid footsteps approaching off to the side somewhere, emanating from deeper in the dark, shadowy room.

"_Shit…"_

The fox was about to make a suicidal dash for better cover from the two-pronged attack when a deafening _boom _erupted from the same direction as the flanking assailant, followed immediately by the solid, meaty sound of a body hitting the pavement full on.

The sub-machine gunner cut his stream of bullets to the pillar, and instead refocused his attention on the unseen source of the single gunshot. Free of the suppressing fire, the vagrant vulpine switched the borrowed, bodyguard's pistol into his right, tipless-gloved hand, leaned halfway out from the pillar, and zeroed in on the gunner.

Standing in plain sight, the rapid-fire weapon-totting foe had ignored cover in the confidence that as long as he kept the fox pinned, he wouldn't need it. But with a new enemy lurking in the shadows, the gunner shifted his attention away from his first target, leaving him wide open. The other two occupants of the warehouse, having kicked over the metal table they had been dealing at for cover, were safely out of sight behind it.

It only took a fraction of second for the fox to line up his borrowed pistol on the gunner, not more than fifteen meters away, and bring him down with a flurry of semi-automatic shots to the torso, ending the sub-machine gun's stream of bullets once and for all.

Tossing aside the empty pistol, the vulpine shifted his own handgun to his right hand and charged the table without hesitation, passing the downed gunner and finally diving for cover behind a metal-laced crate when he was a mere five meters out. Hot metal screamed overhead as the pair behind the table popped up and traced his run, pinning him once again, this time to the box.

Again, the fox heard footsteps from deep within the warehouse as the source of the single booming gunshot repositioned himself. They stopped soon after they began, indicating in the vulpine's mind that the unseen sniper had gotten to a good vantage point. Taking another deep breath, and failing in an attempt to settle his pounding heart, the fox quietly cleared his throat as the hail of projectiles overhead came to a brief stop.

"Listen up fellas," he began, his voice echoing further than the five meters it needed to reach, "You don't have to die here. I'm coming out now, unarmed, to take you into custody in the name of the Cornerian City Police. If you show any signs of hostility, I can guarantee you won't walk out of here alive. If you cooperate, I can put in a good wo-"

"Stow it merc!" a sharp voice replied defiantly from behind the table, "Come out from your hole and see how long you last."

"_You'd better have a damn good shot, partner," _the fox silently said to himself as he stuck his pistol out into the open above the metal box, showing his intent before speaking out loud.

"You know what I'm going to do; your role is your choice."

The mercenary in vagrant's clothes closed his eyes tightly for a moment and opened them, placing his hand on the box's edge for leverage and easing himself out of cover slowly. But before he could even get a solid grip on the box's lip, a slug pinged off the metal centimeters from his fingers. He jerked the hand back behind the crate and cursed out of surprise.

But before the source of the bullet could even begin to laugh, another earsplitting crack reverberated throughout the warehouse. The fox heard a snarl of surprise and anger just before the familiar sound of a body slapping the pavement silenced it. The clatter of a weapon following its owner confirmed that there was only a solo hostile left behind the table.

"Stop! Alright!" a final voice called out, the clanking of a handgun hitting a rusted old crate rack coming on the exclamation's heels, "I give."

"He's clear Fox," a familiar voice echoed from further in the warehouse, "He's smarter than his late buddy."

Trusting the last declaration, the vulpine emerged from behind the crate and stretched to his full height. The retriever he had seen entering the building just before the whole firefight started stood behind the table, his empty hands already placed behind his head. He wore an expression that fell somewhere between hatred and a grudging respect, although it leaned heavily towards the former. The vagrant quickly closed the remaining distance to the man, training his weapon on him the entire time.

In the dim shadows of the warehouse, the fox couldn't fully make out the retriever's identifying features, but once he was close enough to grab the man, he grabbed a small electronic device from somewhere in his dirty, mud-caked cloak. Raising the small camera to bear on the scowling retriever, he triggered the device and it captured a picture with a flash that would've been blinding if the vulpine wasn't expecting it.

After a few moments of processing, a tiny message appeared on the camera's equally tiny screen in confirming green font. The fox smiled, turning his attention back to the man in front of him, who was blinking furiously as he tried to regain his vision after the blinding flash of the camera.

"Goodnight Mr. Zertha."

And with that, he squeezed the trigger of his specially loaded pistol, launching a serum-laden dart into Mr. Zertha's neck. The retriever barely had time to grunt before the fast-acting toxin numbed his muscles and knocked him out cold.

Even as the unconscious body hit the ground, the mercenary had already slipped a com unit out of his cloak.

"Peppy, bring 'er around. We got one sleeping and one…" he said as he regarded the pair of still beings behind the table, pausing as he caught sight of the gaping hole in the second body's chest, "Well, he's sleeping too, but he isn't ever waking up."

With a laugh of conquest, a second, taller, shadow appeared at the vulpine's side, hefting the deceased target over his shoulders and nudging the fox with his elbow. Even in the darkness, the mercenary could see the grin on his friend's face, outlined slightly by the green castoff light of the night-vision goggles the avian had pushed up onto his forehead.

"'Your role is your choice'?" the avian said with mirth, shifting his lifeless load so that the sniper rifle slung around his shoulder didn't conflict with it, "That's pretty deep Fox; you should be a friggin' philosopher or somethin'."

"Yeah, right," Fox McCloud replied with a smile, dragging the unconscious but still living target behind him as they both headed towards the warehouse entrance. He stooped to pick up the sub-machine gun its owner had dropped not more than a minute ago as he passed it. Two weeks may've passed, but his team's financial situation hadn't seemed to have improved any. They still needed whatever equipment and credits they could scavenge.

Out front, Peppy emerged from a van they had loaned from the Cornerian City Police upon accepting the contract, circling around the vehicle and opening the rear doors for the mercenaries. The old, rusted, barely-operational van fit in well with the surroundings outside the warehouse, the Police having cleverly disguised it as an old, rusty, barely-operational van. Fox mentally shrugged as he and Falco tossed their targets into the back: it was better than hauling the bodies to the Third Precinct station on foot.

Falco jumped in the spacious storage area behind their prey, grabbing one of the van's rear doors and hauling it shut behind him while Fox stayed outside and pushed the other into place. Hearing Peppy start the vehicle up, the hare having since reoccupied the driver's seat, the 'vagrant' vulpine jogged around the van and took up the passenger seat adjacent to his elder.

Slamming the door shut, Fox grabbed for the security belt, only to realize when his hand snagged empty air that the rusted motor wasn't equipped with them. Grinning as the dated van further showed its wear with a throaty exhaust cough as it got underway, the orange-furred mercenary combed his empty hand through the short-haired streak of white running up his forehead like a stunted mohawk. He forgot that the once brilliant ashen fur had been smeared with grime and dirt for his disguise for the contract.

Converting his grin into a smirk of humorous disgust as he pulled his paw back, seeing the filth that covered it and realizing that all of his exposed fur was still matted with it, he turned to his companions in the van.

"By the way guys, I call first use of the refresher shower once we get back."


	7. Chapter 7: Downtime

So, I figured with the insanely long time between updates, I would put a little bit of a recap up here at the top, just so those who have already read this far don't have to look back through all the past chapters, and so the new comers can catch up with reading all the back story. Ahem…

Star Fox is a mercenary crew for hire in the year following the Lylat War (Star Fox 64, or Lylat Wars for our European friends). They enjoy mixed obscurity due to the fact that General Pepper never really let it be publicly known that the Star Fox troupe played the largest part in the victory over Venom. Their most recent major contract was an escort job for some weapons smugglers in Meteos.

The convoy Fox and Falco were meant to protect came under fire in the Briar Pocket of Meteos, where one of the three transports was destroyed. Of the six attacking starfighters, only a fighter and a bomber escaped. One of the assailants was disabled in a head-to-head joust with Fox. Upon arrival at the Riley Freeport in Meteos, the smugglers refused to pay Star Fox due to the loss of one of the freighters. In addition, the mercenaries are threatened with forced servitude to the criminal organization. Fox and Falco escape and swipe the smuggler boss' weighty wallet as compensation.

On the way back to the _Great Fox _outside Meteos, they stumble upon and rescue the broken ship of the unconscious pilot he had hit head-on in the previous skirmish. The lynx and her beaten ship are taken back to the _Great Fox._

Upon arrival, she is placed in the _Great Fox_'s meager medbay and treated as much as she could. She awakens once on the trip back to Corneria, and acquires a fury towards Fox for destroying her ship and leaving her in her current condition. She is either unaware or doesn't care that he also saved her.

Once on Corneria, she is offloaded to a hospital near the starport, and the Star Fox team takes a ground contract from the Cornerian police to bust an illegal arms deal. Still, despite a successful bounty, the Star Fox team still finds itself in dire straits as far as funding goes.

The lynx meanwhile, and unbeknownst to Star Fox, has escaped the hospital, and is currently hunting them down.

And that should bring everything up to date.

* * *

**VII****:**_ Downtime_

The Cornerian Planetary Library was quite a sight to behold.

A high ceiling of crystal-clear glass panels blanketed the rows upon rows of traditional bookshelves and banks of personal data desks beneath. Only the thinnest of support beams threaded their way through the virtual dome of sparkling transparent material, lending the illusion of open skies to the studious occupants below. Contrary to the traditional stereotype of the dreary library enthusiast, the bright, shining sun seemed to invigorate every manner of person as they went about their search for knowledge.

Down on the fiber-carpeted floor, the elegantly decorated hardwood bookcases were accented by the occasional exotic potted plant, some arranged in clusters to allow a few book enthusiasts to sequester themselves away in a miniature forest with a favorite tome or portable datapad. The bookshelves would break at regular intervals to allow room for a group of comfortably cushioned chairs and loveseats, or an information kiosk.

Unique to the library, and complimenting the authentic plant life, a genuine stream curved and ran its way through the grounds in a channel of rock and granite, elevated to waist height. The ambient sounds of the river as it twisted its way around the library joined with the reproduction calls and titters of several species of tropical, non-sentient birds being pumped through hidden speakers to give the massive store of data and literature a soothing and relaxing soundtrack.

In the middle of the structure, a casually dressed lynx occupied a seat at one of the many public datadesk banks that dotted the grounds. She had ditched her previous outfit before entering the library, knowing that the nurse's uniform's solid sky blue color scheme would stand out more than she'd like. And besides, she preferred the faded green trousers and black tee-shirt she had been wearing all along. As a mental side note, she realized that she didn't remember acquiring the black shirt from anywhere, and assumed that the mercenaries she had been 'saved' by had loaned it to her for one reason or another. She shrugged to herself with indifference. It was comfortable regardless.

However, the train of thought had brought her back to her original purpose at the library. Punching in the general access code on her terminal she brought up the search function, making sure the public privacy settings were activated. A tiny flashing icon on the screen ensured that the tint of the monitor was such that only those standing directly behind the lynx would be able to see anything other than a blank screen. Satisfied with the privacy settings, she entered her query, using the only concrete information she knew about the mercenary troupe that would get her anywhere.

"_Fox…McCloud…"_

She repeated the name to herself as she typed it in, somehow managing to sound incensed by the name even in her own thoughts. A small hourglass appeared onscreen as a gradually filling bar symbolized the search's progress through every text and digital source contained in the library.

Ever since the thought had seared itself into her mind that this 'Fox McCloud', or at least one of his wingmates, was responsible for the utter destruction of her ship and her own extensive injuries, the young lynx had made it her all-consuming goal to track the mercenary down. What she would do if she ever found him again, she hadn't yet reached in her mental calculations, but there was time for that later.

The hourglass icon faded as the bar filled completely and was replaced instead by a menu of the top search results for her query, starting with a government file from the Exterior Resources department of the Cornerian Military. Following the link with a click of her pointer, the lynx found herself looking at a roster of several mercenary teams hired by the Lylatian Navy over the past few years. A relatively ancient constitutional bylaw had stated that this sort of information was to remain public, but the military officials had found loopholes around it for truly sensitive information.

Luckily for the lynx though, she wasn't after any of the classified info: only names and pictures. Scrolling down the page, she eventually found the entry for her 'Fox McCloud', and opened the squad register for the unit. Her lips curled into only the faintest of smiles as she assessed the information presented to her.

The basic headshot of the vulpine labeled as the team leader matched her savior-turned-antagonist to the very shade of rusted fur and annoyingly verdant eyes. Lingering a second on the picture of the fox, and noting that the emotionless look he had given the camera was a far cry from the expressive visage she had witnessed, the lynx moved on to the other, more important information.

Underneath all of the text on the team's fairly limited digital infocard, the lynx noted an orangish-red watermark logo, shaped in the silhouette of an ancient, pre-evolved vulpine with added wings. She took this to be McCloud's team's insignia, which by itself was fairly insignificant for her purposes. However, when combined with everything she either knew or assumed, it was all she needed to find him.

She knew that Fox's mercenary unit owned their own capital ship, and, by the size of the med bay she had been preliminarily treated in, it was probably a smaller model. Chances were, when they had touched down in Corneria City, they had logically looked up the closest medical center to deposit her in. So now, it was simply a matter of going to the starport nearest to the hospital she had been kept at for the past two weeks, and locating a smallish capital ship with the crimson insignia she had just found. And then…well, what would happen once she found the fox again was still unclear.

"_If they're even still on planet," _she reminded herself, taking a final look at the pictures of each of the four listed members and signing off the public desk.

The lynx instinctively reached for her personal duffel bag as she pushed her chair out, only to grasp empty air. She cursed quietly to herself, remembering that all of her personal effects were still onboard her fighter, or what was left of it, on the deck of McCloud's capital ship. Sighing, she shrugged to herself and mentally chalked it up as another reason to track the mercenaries down.

She noticed an older hare occupying the terminal directly across from her giving her a reprimanding look as she stood to leave. It took a split second to put two and two together to realize that he must've overheard her cursing to herself moments before. As she understood though, she merely returned the look with a venomous gaze of her own. She hated when people didn't mind their own business.

* * *

"I would say nine…_maybe _ten thousand credits total, guys."

Falco sat up in disbelief, leaning forward in his comfortable rec room chair. Like the rest of his team gathered in various states of worn relaxation around the lounge, the avian and his work garb were caked in grime and oil, left over from both their mission the previous day, and from some preliminary evaluation and sizing up of the derelict former-spacefighter occupying a spot in the _Great Fox_'s landing bay.

He ran a hand through his head plumage in frustration, "That's _it_? That hunk of space debris is worth less than ten grand?"

Slippy consulted a holo-clipboard for a moment and nodded slowly, speaking without looking up, "I'm afraid so." Then, fixing his gaze on the avian in an uncharacteristically unfaltering stare, he added, "I mean, you said it Falco; that pilot's ship isn't much more than a piece of wreckage. Fox really did a number on 'er."

"Pfft…" Falco uttered dismissively, "But c'mon; even half a starfighter should be worth more than the fifteen grand we found in that gunrunner's briefcase. _That _was enough to buy barely a handful of sidearms. You're telling me that lynx's fighter's worth less than that?"

"I'm afraid so," Slippy repeated. After a pause though, he trailed off, "Although…"

"Although…what?" Falco asked, raising an eyebrow with interest.

"No, Slippy," the previously quiet Fox interjected from his own seat, already knowing where the toad was going, "We're not tearing apart the cockpit. There's probably personal stuff in there."

"But, there could be some pricy avionics in there also," Falco said, catching on and rubbing his hands together, smiling slightly, "We could just-"

"No," Fox said again, with more force, "I don't care what's in there; we're not invading that pilot's personal property."

"Guh. Seriously?" the avian said, rolling his eyes and staring over at Fox. He was fully expecting the vulpine to object on some moral ground or another, but he wasn't ready for it to be so stubborn. "You're seriously going to pull the 'I'm so noble' card? Ease up, man."

Fox's face took on a more serious tint, and his eyes narrowed. To him, there was no question to the issue, "I'm not going to go rooting through someone else's stuff."

"Relax Foxie," Falco quipped, meeting his friend's stare, "What do you think we're going to do? Yank out her purse and start passing around her pictures and makeup, giggling and gossiping like a coupla school girls? 'Oh, did you see her in _this_ one? She looks so _ugly. _Oh my _gawd'_."

Slippy stifled a giggle of his own as Falco continued gesturing. Peppy, who until this point had watched them all with a thoughtful hand on his chin, smiled slightly and put his hand out, "Cut it out Falco."

The avian smirked but stopped, reluctantly obeying his elder. The tension between him and Fox slowly simmered and subsided from the room as Peppy held their attention, silent until he was sure the effect had taken place.

"Listen guys, you both have valid points," he began, folding his hands into a steeple and leaning back in his chair. He then extended the left palm, face up, as if he were holding something, "On the one hand, Fox is absolutely right. I feel like a father teaching his kit a lesson here, but we don't go rooting through other people's things. Sure, we're a mercenary troupe, but I think it's obvious to all of us that we've made a point to stay on the morally correct side of things in the past as much as circumstances allow."

Peppy then repeated the motion with his right. "And on the other hand, Falco's suggestion is correct as well. We need the money more than…well, more than I'd like us to, and we could use every credit we can jump on. Whether or not we compromise morals is dependent on the situation, but ultimately, if it comes down to it, I'd rather take this opportunity than let it pass and file for bankruptcy."

Peppy let his hands fall to his lap, and sighed, turning to Fox. "However, as much as I appreciate you all listening to an old man speak, it's ultimately your decision Fox. You're our commander here, and we wouldn't be much of a mercenary crew if we didn't follow the occasional order."

Falco folded his arms and exhaled in frustration, glancing at the vulpine, crestfallen. It was fairly obvious that when given control over the situation, any sane individual would choose to trust his own opinion over someone else's. However, much to his surprise, Fox didn't immediately order the dismissal of the avian's idea: he just stared at the ground, lost in thought. Several silent moments passed before he finally looked up again, finally speaking.

"Fine Falco," he said reluctantly, as if each word had a weight attached to it and it took effort just to utter them. "Just, promise me that if you find anything that could be considered personal, you'll leave it alone."

Recovering from his surprise, the avian just grinned, knowing he had won and loving it. Standing and slapping the weary vulpine on the back, he said, "You made the right choice buddy." After beckoning Slippy towards the door from the room, he added, "I think I just felt my second wind, too; I'll get started on it right away."

And, just before they went through the doorway, Falco stopped and leaned back, unable to let one more quip go, "And trust me, our coffers will thank you."

* * *

Dawn was barely cracking over the New Memories' cluster of hangers and docking bays when she reached the front door. A series of layers split the sky into rough stripes ranging from a deep purple to blazing orange, smoothly and subtly fading into the bordering stripe. Not a cloud occupied any of the airspace above Corneria City, pointing to a bright, sunny day ahead; the kind of day where one couldn't help but smile when they walked outside. The kind of day where one could make an entire afternoon out of simply sitting in the sunshine.

"_Too bad it's still barely morning."_

A lone figure stood across the street from the entrance to the space port, leaning against a tree that provided enough shade to mask her identity. A shiver ran down her spine as she hugged herself for a moment for warmth before refolding her arms. Regretting her decision to throw away the relatively warm nurse's dress and apron, she shrugged off the early morning chill and continued to watch inside the small building.

Inside was a plush, if cursory, lobby, containing a large waiting area and a hallway in the back that lead to the huge complex of corridors and hangers that made up the body of the port. However, it was clerk's desk that she was watching. Or, more specifically, the clerk.

She had timed her arrival at the front of the space port to coincide with the end of the graveyard shift of most businesses, which provided the most likely chance of catching the clerk in the position he was in currently. The leopard behind the desk bobbed his head every few seconds, only to have it shoot right back up as he regained full consciousness, at least, until he began falling asleep again. It was the telltale sign of anyone who had been on an all-night shift for a bit too long.

"_It should be just a matter of minutes now," _the figure thought as she popped another biostimulant in her mouth, noting with casual indifference that her supply was already running low. The stimulants had done their job admirably, as the lynx felt very little other than energized, despite the reasons for her stay in the hospital. Some muscles and joints felt a little stiff and foreign, but none of them had impeded her so far.

Sure enough, within the next five minutes, the clerk was down, face buried in his folded arms on the counter in front of him. Waiting a few moments to make sure he was really asleep, the figure under the tree made her move, and crossed the deserted, early morning street to the building. The door opened with nary a sound, and she was in.

Padding carefully across the empty lobby and towards the hallway in the back, the figure switched her gaze between the corridor and the snoring clerk. It wasn't that she was necessarily doing anything illegal; the hanger wasn't commercial, so none of the rigorous security checks would be necessary, and visitors were always welcomed. It was just that she figured the clerk would let _them _know ahead of time that she was coming, and he'd probably ask too many questions she wasn't willing to answer.

So, she successfully snuck by the leopard, easing open the hallway double doors and slipping through, beginning her search of the ship that represented her objective.

* * *

The room was dark.

The sort of inky, indelible blackness that could only be achieved by an indoor space at night. Not that there were any windows to the outside world. The room simply felt like how a bedroom at night should feel; comfortable and still.

A streamlined, modern-looking grandfather clock hung on one of the walls of the room, though it still retained the signature quiet-but-firm ticking its kind traditionally emits. A dozen pictures and trophies dotted the desk and dresser, taken and won, respectively, in a past, an era which had been kinder to the Star Fox team. The next day's clothes sat folded, piled neat and straight, on top of the reclining chair located in the far corner of the rectangular space. Those adjectives could probably be reused on the entire room as a whole; the vulpine who dozed in the single bunk seemed to appreciate the appeal of keeping one's sleeping quarters clean.

It was into this sanctuary of quiet solitude that a certain toad burst, panting and shouting the occupant's name.

* * *

Fox yawned, shooting his arms out to his sides and basking briefly in the sterile glow of the hallway's dim lighting. Stretching his weary muscles to their fullest, he let his hands fall back to his sides as he continued to rub the sleep out of his eyes. He wasn't exactly used to getting up this early, and it showed.

"So, tell me again why you got me up at…" he began, glancing down at his wristwatch as the massive yawn finally subsided, "Five seventeen in the morning?"

"Well, I think it'd be best if you just saw for yourself," Slippy replied, oblivious to the slight tint of annoyance present in his friend's voice. Then, as they turned a corner and approached the bridge, he continued with unhidden enthusiasm, "He hasn't opened a video channel yet, but over the audio he said that he had a job offer, and that it was for your ears only."

"_Really?" _Fox thought, considering the stout toad's words, _"So, at least it's a legit reason to get up then. But who makes a call to a mercenary troupe this early in the morning? And who does that _and _requests that it be for me only?"_

The _Great Fox_'s bridge appeared to be in the same powered down state as the hallways of the rest of the ship. Only a fraction of the operation consoles were activated, and the amount of lights blinking with life was dwarfed by the number that weren't. And all of the most active terminals were located at Slippy's own station, indicating the toad's lack of sleep that night, although that was hardly unusual.

What was unusual though was the flashing green switch located on the communications console, indicating a transmission in waiting.

"_For _my _ears only?" _Fox wondered as he took his seat at the center of the small bridge, falling heavily into the cushioned chair and suppressing another yawn of exhaustion, _"I wonder what that could mean…"_

"Alright Slippy, put 'er through."

Slippy nodded and flipped the green, flashing toggle, prompting the massive, stretched viewport in the center of the bridge to spawn a large rectangular box. It has essentially created a digital window on the _Great Fox_'s main viewport, rendering it in a way that made it appear to float in space between the vessel itself and walls of the starport hanger that contained it beyond. Per the transmission qualifier he had just told Fox, the toad then left the bridge.

The transmission was initially filled with static, but it slowly subsided, gradually forming a sharp image of a canine waiting patiently against a plain, nondescript grey wall. The caller stared into space, quietly lost in his own thoughts. As the picture cleared though, Fox sat up and blinked the remaining sleep out of his eyes. The canine wore the gunmetal grey and dark green of a Cornerian officer, though the lack of a significant number of campaign ribbons or rank patches indicated his lower echelon. Still, despite the official uniform and stately stature, it was impossible to ignore the signature shades perched up on his head, or the mussed hair caused by a starfighter pilot's helmet.

Now completely yanked from his state of semi-conscious awareness, the vulpine's lips curled into a familiar smirk as the canine on the other end became aware that he was no longer on hold. The caller returned the grin with one of his own, and opened his mouth to speak.

"Fox; it's been way too long, man."

"You're tellin' me Bill," he replied, somehow laughing and retaining his smirk at the same time, unable to keep his voice calm and neutral, "How've you been buddy?! It's been _ages_!"

Bill's response was just as jovial, tinged with the same growing excitement as the vulpine, "I _know, _dude! I'm doing pretty well for myself actually…" He trailed off, slyly shifting his weight so that the rank insignia on his right shoulder came into view.

"Are those Flight Sergeant's chevrons?" Fox exclaimed in amazement, "Congratulations, man! When'd you get 'em?"

"Well, technically they're uh," the canine began, coughing in mock snobbery, "_First _Flight Sergeant chevrons to be precise. I got them pretty recently actually. I was doing a standard two-man sweep of a section of Meteos near the Briar Pocket and my wingman and I stumbled upon these two smugglers. A fighter and a bomber, I think; they looked like they had just come from a fight. Anyway, long story short, we wasted them and it was enough to push my promotion over the edge I guess."

"Huh," Fox replied, trying desperately to cover the extreme sense of coincidence that had abruptly washed over him, "Well hey, that's two less smugglers, right?"

"Sure is," Bill said with a grin, faltering slightly though as he continued, "Oh, ah, sorry about the early wake up though; I sorta forgot the time change between Katina and Corneria."

"Ah, don't worry 'bout it," the vulpine insisted, leaning forward and cracking his knuckles, "But while we're on the subject, what's up?"

"Well, my promotion to First Flight Sergeant for the Cornerian garrison here comes with a few added responsibilities," Bill said, sighing, "Sadly, they have nothing to do with flying a starfighter. They're all related to being an adjunct for the town nearby. Ya know, they provide us with food and civilian grounding and we supply them with protection and military preference, yada yada yada."

Fox nodded and shifted his hand, a visual cue for him to keep going.

"Anyway, one of the more recent requests we had was by the town's biggest company, and source of most of the resident's employment, Blue Arrow Shipping. They ship all sorts of stuff, but more recently, they've been doing some runs to one of our supply dumps near Sector X for our base; basic small arms munitions, spare parts, things like that. We've been paying them well and good, and they seem pretty happy with it, especially since we use the runs to train new recruits, which means they're never at a loss of protection. However…"

"Alright, alright, I'm up!"

Falco burst onto the bridge with all the grace of bear fresh from hibernation. Still in his pajamas, and with a heavy dose of the closest thing avian had to 'bedhead', he clearly had not woken up from his slumber intentionally.

"I could hear you two from halfway down the friggin' hallway!" he exclaimed, bracing a hand on the bridge doorframe, "It's _five-thirty_ in the friggin' morning! Why can't you guys talk at a normal _friggin'_ civilized time-"

"Falco!" Bill greeted him, smiling and wearing a surprised look on his face.

"Wha?" the drowsy avian replied, turning from Fox to the viewscreen, squinting through sleep-encrusted eyes. It was as though he had never seen a transmission window before. A moment of peering uncomprehending at the viewscreen passed before he finally responded, "Oh, hey Bill." Then, turning back to the vulpine he opened his mouth to yell at him again before what he had just seen finally registered.

"Bill!" Falco exclaimed, eyes brightening and completely shedding his tired, irritable self from sheer seconds before, "How the hell are ya man?! Dude I haven't seen you since what, just after the the Lylat War-"

"Falco, shut your trap for a second," Fox barked uncharacteristically, surprising the avian and amusing the canine in the viewport window, "Bill, go ahead."

Falco tilted his head back in mock whiplash, stunned from the vulpine's sudden outburst and mumbling under his breath, "Well, jeez, just greeting an old friend…"He made his surly way over to his designated chair on the bridge and took it, crossing his arms and leaning back to hear what the canine had to say.

Bill grinned and kept going where he left off, now speaking to both mercenaries. "Um, yeah, so everything's been going pretty smoothly up until a couple of days ago. A shipment of small arms and ammunition was making its way to the supply dump and had just reached the edge of the Sector X debris field when we lost contact with them. We still haven't heard back from them. From _any _of them; the convoy was four freighters and half a squadron of fighters large."

"Well Sector X isn't exactly known for getting good com reception," Falco quipped, "Maybe they just couldn't get a signal out?"

Bill nodded, "That's what we thought too, but even after they should've reached the supply depot, they still didn't make contact. The depot said they never heard from the convoy either." He sighed and continued, clearly not happy with what he was about to say next, "But, command insisted that they keep the shipments going, so we set up another convoy, this one with some more support, and sent them off."

"And…?" Falco trailed off.

"Same result," Bill replied sadly, "But this time, we got a lead. One of our escort fighters managed to fire off a message pod that broadcast as soon as it got out of range of the Sector X com distortion. It said that a pair of corvettes was the source of the lost convoys, and that they and a squadron of fighters had just raided that second convoy. The message cut out after that."

"So why don't you guys just go and tear up those corvettes with the big guns?" Fox asked.

"We would," the canine answered, shrugging, "But especially after Grand Admiral Markiss' retooling of the fleets to go after the Warlords, anything larger than a gunboat has been hard to come by. And without a substantial vessel to hold off those corvettes, our fighters are pretty much useless. So, since command calculated the cost of casualties in sending half of our base's fighter wing to secure the trade route and didn't like the figures, they, along with Blue Arrow, put out a sizeable, closed contract on taking down those corvettes."

"And when I was promoted to First Flight Sergeant, one of my duties entailed finding suitable private contractors to fulfill cases like this." Bill grinned, adding with a smirk, "So, are you interested?"

Fox and Falco's eyes widened and met each other for a split second, smiles also starting to spread across their faces, too. It was all too easy to etch imaginary credit signs in their eyes; they wore their excitement so openly.

"Are you kidding?" Fox replied eagerly, "When do we start?"

Bill laughed, appearing just as happy as the mercenaries were to receive the assignment. "Really?" he asked jokingly, "But you haven't even heard the conditions or payment!"

"Dude, it's a job," Falco said, the grin still plastered to his face, "I don't know if Fox told you already, but we're broke as sin right now. And if there's one other person we can trust in Lylat, it's you, bro."

"I'm glad to hear it Falco," came the reply, the canine hiding his emotions well. Then turning to Fox, he finished.

"To answer your question though, you start immediately."

* * *

So, just like always, I'm always open to any and all reviews. Criticisms, compliments, current events discussions...one sentence or several pages, it all works for me. And, also like always, thank you for reading my work.


	8. Chapter 8: Reload

**VIII****: **_Reload_

"And I personally stand by the power of these pieces of hardware; they might not have the tonnage, but they can spark quite the bang."

The _Great Fox's _hanger bay was a bit more crowded than usual, and thanks to the addition of rectangular racks upon racks of nasty looking ballistic weaponry, a bit more deadly, too. They lined the wall furthest from the massive hanger doors, framing the doorway that lead further into the carrier. Actually, to make space, they had to be pushed a little closer together, which meant the missiles protruded slightly into the doorway.

"_I'll have to tell the rest of the team to keep their heads down as they come in," _Fox thought as he brought his attention back to the weapons dealer and nodded at his words.

The cougar was wearing the standard tie and button-down shirt that identified him as a casual businessman, though it looked slightly out of place in such a quasi-legal setting as a weapons deal. With a reassuring smile that Fox was sure had been practiced for several hours when the cougar woke up that morning, he affectionately patted the nearest warhead on the nearest rack. Fox winced. It wasn't that he thought with any conviction that the simple pat would set off the missile, but one of the first laws of interacting with explosives was to not perturb them without reason.

The weapons dealer's men had arrived with surprising speed after the team had contacted their company that morning and had driven the truck with the mercenary's order straight up to the _Great Fox _to offload. They could be seen in the background removing the weighty missiles in two man crews from the covered flatbed and agonizingly hobbling them up the hanger's ramp and over to the racks that had been previously set up. Clad in matching jumpsuits, the teamsters had made fairly good progress, as only a few more of the warhead remained in on the truck.

A dull, hollow thud abruptly caught the vulpine's attention and he turned towards the smaller hanger door.

A stunned Falco stumbled back into the hallway he had just come from and fell with a grunt, cursing quite colorfully in his usual manner. Rubbing his forehead and staring with confusion at the offending missile, jutting out into the doorway, he induced another wince from Fox, who was more concerned about setting off the ordinance than a little bump on his friend's noggin. The wince turned into a mouth agape though, as the avian stood and wound up for a kick of frustration. On the missile.

"Falco, stop!" Fox cried, stepping forward towards him.

The avian's foot struck the metal shell of the warhead and bounced right back with another dull, hollow thud. Falco's eyes bulged and he cursed again, clutching his battered foot and howling as much as a member of his species could.

"_Alright_, can we seriously just _stop_ beating up the rockets?" Fox exclaimed, raising his arms in aggravation, staring at his friend.

"But the thing just jumped out at me," Falco retorted, pointing at the inanimate object and sounding equally as annoyed.

"It's a _friggin' missile_!" Fox shouted back, gesturing towards the seven or eight racks of the warheads, "Am I the only sane one here?! Wasn't the first thing they taught you in flight school 'don't kick the high explosives'?"

The weapons dealer crossed his arms and laughed at the argument for a few moments before tapping Fox on the shoulder, "Actually sir, you don't have to worry. I've personally made certain that each of these weapons is as inactive as dirt until the supplied launch code is given by your fighters. Watch."

The cougar turned and whistled at the nearest pair of laborers, who were still halfway across the hanger, waving at them to get their attention. When he had, he called out, "Johnson, you and the new guy put that load down; hard."

Without hesitation, the larger and burlier of the two let go of the tip of the missile, letting it strike the deck plate below with an echoing _boom._ The other jumpsuited worker seemed just as shocked as the vulpine did, and jumped back in surprise, letting the tail end fall with an equally deafening sound. The weapons dealer smiled and raised his hands in a thumbs-up, thanking the pair and telling them to get back to work.

Fox threw his hands up again, relenting and sighing. "Fine," he said grudgingly, putting his hand out for the clipboard at the dealer's side, "Where do I sign?"

The cougar grinned and extended the contract, reading off the contents as the vulpine signed, "Three dozen _Mark IV Firestorm_, Extended Range, High Yield warheads, decommissioned from the Cornerian Military just last year. Classified as just on the edge of being _safe _enough for sale for civilian use. Perfect for taking out Gunboat to Corvette sized _asteroids, _if you catch my drift." The dealer said the last sentence with a sly wink as he took the signed contract back from the mercenary.

Fox replied with a grin, though he still hadn't recovered from what years of training told him should've been a disaster only a minute before, "Yeah, those _asteroids _won't know what hit 'em." He grasped the dealer's hand and shook it, noticing that the last warhead was just being offloaded.

"It's been pleasure, like always," the dealer said, returning the firm grip, "Ya know, General Pepper doesn't clear just anyone for this kind of ordinance, and definitely not mercenary crews; you guys must've done something to get on his good side. I trust I can count on your business again in the future, Mr. McCloud?"

"Sure can," Fox answered, noting the pseudo-compliment and adding with a smile, "So long as you don't make a habit of dropping large explosives on my hanger deck."

* * *

"So, what: I duck in here for a second to take a leak and I get stuck with final inspection duty?!"

"It's yur fault fer not bein' present at the meeting newbie," the com unit spoke back, tinny but clear.

"What meeting?" the jumpsuit-clad lynx replied, standing in front of the dingy mirror in the public starport bathroom.

"The meeting we 'ad just a second ago."

"I was takin' a _leak_!" the worker shouted back, his voice echoing in the small but empty restroom. "Whatdya expect me to do? Hold it?"

"Not our problem newbie; we left the checklist and a jeep out by the merc's ship. Consider this a welcome to the company." A chorus of laughter could clearly be heard in the background as the lynx cut the connection.

He cursed and shoved the com unit in his pocket, rolling up his sleeves and activating the sink. Mumbling curses to himself as he washed his hands, he heard the bathroom door squeal open and shut, admitting another person. The lynx grunted a greeting but kept his eyes on his own hands as the figure walked to the vacant row of urinals. Reaching for the deactivation handle on the wash basin, the other occupant of the bathroom spoke, facing opposite the lynx.

"Tough bein' the new guy, eh?"

Almost immediately, even as he was turning around, he realized something was wrong. The newcomer's voice sounded _too _gruff and male; to the point where it was fairly obvious that it was being faked. But before he could even catch a glimpse of the newcomer, a slender but firm arm slipped its way around his neck, squeezing shut the vital veins and airways. The last air that could escape from his lungs did so in a weak yelp. A vicious twist locked his neck muscles and doubled him over, forcing him to stare helplessly at the mirror where he could finally catch a glimpse of his assailant.

She, as with her head peering up from over his shoulder it was unmistakable now, looked shockingly like the jumpsuited worker himself, prompting a questioning grunt from the latter as he briefly stopped struggling. The female lynx seemed to take notice of this fact too, as her eyebrow shot up in a similarly questioning manner. Tightening her grip, she shrugged it off though, pressing harder still into his neck until he finally, slowly slipped into unconsciousness and fell to the dirty floor. Just as he did though, one final thought fled his mind.

"_I thought…this was the men's room…"_

* * *

She straightened the jumpsuit and tightened the belt, sizing herself up in the restroom mirror.

The previous owner of the single-piece garment lay slumped over in one of the stalls, left in his undershirt and briefs with the door closed shut. The lynx secretly thanked the fact that very few people actually used the starport's public restrooms, thereby lowering her risk of discovery to the point where she could take her time. Her only real reason to hurry was to catch the Star Fox team before they could take off, and she figured she still had another five or ten minutes left before that happened.

Looking at her sideways reflection though, the lynx frowned. She was confident she could pull off the gait and speech of the male lynx she had just knocked out and assumed the identity of, but the overall look was proving to be a bit of a challenge. Loosening up the belt, she pulled at a few points in the jumpsuit, making it baggy enough to hide her modest feminine curves. The end result hid the physical attributes of her gender well enough at a sacrifice of fashion, though she truly didn't mourn the latter. Pulling the matching hat from the jumpsuit's pocket, she donned it and pulled the bill down far over her face.

"_Perfect,"_ she thought, nodding at what appeared to be the original male owner of the clothes she was wearing in the mirror. _"This just might work."_

Turning to leave, she reached for the restroom door and stopped, staring at her outstretched right hand as it flexed around the handle.

Ever since she had escaped the hospital just the day before, she had noticed that every little motion in her right hand and left arm was accompanied by a slight twinge of _something_. It wasn't pain; the biostimulants she had been taking to stay alert and energized had painkillers incorporated in them. Suspiciously strong painkillers. However, the lynx had a sinking feeling that had she not been insulated from pain, she would be in agony right now. She was pushing her already beaten body past its limits, and lacked a sense of pain that would normally let her know when too much was too much. It was like flying without an altimeter.

She flexed the freshly regrown tendons and minor bones in her right hand, squeezing it shut and open again, and feeling a tremendous amount of nothing. The lynx had taken her final biostimulants just before assaulting the worker, and knew that it was only a matter of time before all the pressure she had put on her still recovering body over the last twenty-four hours would catch up with her.

She shrugged the thought off, ironically prompting another empty twinge from her recently reset left shoulder as she opened the restroom door and entered the spaceport docking bay proper.

"_Well, hopefully by the time that happens, I'll have reclaimed from those mercs whatever I can."_

* * *

"Jeez, check out the stats on these missiles, ROB," Slippy called, gazing wide-eyed at a datapad he had plugged into the access port on the side of one of the warheads.

The _Great Fox_'s docking bay sat with its gigantic main doors open, exposing the full complement of freshly delivered missiles in their temporary storage racks. Their dull grey paint jobs contrasted sharply with the shining metal of the racks, giving each a visual weight similar to their actual physical mass.

ROB thumped across the hanger to the toad, his heavy metallic footsteps echoing off the walls, and peered over his shoulder at the datapad. His single, elongated eye slit glowed a steady red as he took in the information from Slippy's datapad, algorithms in his programming kicking in and storing the data in memory.

"It appears that the warheads posses sufficient strength to perform well against the corvette class ships we will be encountering," the robot stated, his voice monotonic and unchanging throughout his speech.

He continued to appraise the missile Slippy had has datapad attached to, scanning it with several instruments, until he abruptly stopped. Whirring around a hundred and eighty degrees towards the gaping hanger main doors, he suddenly took on a more threatening tone as his right hand parted to reveal the barrel of a small, hold-out blaster pistol.

"Intruder alert," his voice rang out, now with a sense of urgency replacing the monotonic sound from before. He raised his armed right appendage and took aim at the jumpsuited lynx that now stood before him.

"ROB, no!" Slippy sputtered, jumping to the automaton's side and trying unsuccessfully to push his weapon down, "That's just an inspector." Turning to the worker, who stood with his hands up in the middle of the hanger floor, having apparently been poking around the scrapped fighter wreck, the toad continued, "Right? Fox said someone would come to do a final inspection of all the missiles before we leave."

The lynx slowly lowered his arms and nodded, careful to keep the workman's cap over his face as much as he could. Coughing roughly, he responded with a gruff reply as he tapped the ID badge on his jumpsuit pocket, "Erm, yeah; that's right." Then, regaining whatever composure he seemed to have lost when the robot threatened him, the worker finished, "So, if it's okay with you, I'd like to finish this up quickly and go home."

Slippy nodded at the lynx in the jumpsuit before the words registered and he caught the underlying meaning. Nodding himself and motioning to ROB, he smiled and complied with the worker's unspoken wishes. Both members of Star Fox made their way to the hanger door that connected with the rest of the _Great Fox_, going through and leaving the inspector to tend to his checklists alone.

* * *

"Alright guys, ready to shove off?" Peppy asked the assembled Star Fox crew, all manning their designated positions on the _Great Fox_'s bridge.

Or, as close to manning a station as some of them could get. Falco lay essentially sprawled out over his chair, arms behind his head and feet up on his console, humming some tune or another to himself. And Slippy was sitting at his station alright, but his mind was taken by a small piece of avionics he and Falco had salvaged from the wrecked fighter in a preliminary sweep of the vessel earlier that morning, before the missiles had been delivered. The device was small and cylindrical, sporting the telltale black scorch marks of a short-circuit, but the toad continued to rotate it in his hands just the same, completely fascinated by it.

"Yeah Pep; we're good to go," Fox answered for the rest of the team, grinning at the hare and understanding where the latter's sigh of frustration had come from. "I'll open a channel to New Memories control."

As the vulpine communicated with the launch tower, Peppy tried again to get the toad's attention. "Slippy?" he said, his voice a little louder and more forceful, "Did you clear the situation with the final inspection of those missiles we ordered?"

"Huh?" Slippy grunted, looking up and turning his swivel chair to face the hare. "I'm sorry Peppy," he apologized, holding up the little object that had appeared to have become his newfound passion in life, "I was just-"

"Don't worry about it Slip," Peppy replied, waving off his apology, "Just tell me; did you clear everything with that inspector?"

"Oh, yep; sure did," came the proud answer, as Slippy brandished a slip of paper from his pocket, "I found this taped to the hanger door. Looks like they passed." Peppy got up and took the sheet of carbon copy from the toad, glancing over it and silently appraising the various checkmarks and signatures that dotted the sheet.

Before Peppy could comment on what the inspector himself had to say though, a loud rumbling from below the bridge interrupted them. Fox had just hit the activation for the _Great Fox_'s hanger doors, and the loud echoing of their closing shuddered through the ship. At the same time, the loud hiss of massive thrusters added to the cacophony of industrial achievement racking the ship, as the bottom-mounted lifts fired up.

Outside the _Great Fox_, a flurry of automated actions was taking place. Motors strained and gears squealed as well worn winches whirred into action and pushed the vessel up from underneath. The same network of supports the ship had landed on when it arrived at New Memories Starport now acted as a cradle, gently lifting the _Great Fox _up off the docking bay floor. This gave the ship a clear shot at the Corneria City airspace through the open ceiling above

"Mercenary vessel _Great Fox_, you are clear to launch," a kind female voice sounded over the bridge's com, "Our tower will take over and guide you out of Cornerian airspace as soon as you clear the docking bay walls. Good flying."

"Thanks control," Fox replied, closing the channel and punching in a few more commands, leaving the system open for the pending instructions from the spaceport tower. Then, staring out the viewport at the walls beyond for the last time, he said to the rest of the crew in general, smirking as he used the ancient term, "Anchors aweigh."

The hiss turned into a roar as the _Great Fox _pushed off the docking bay supports, angling upwards. Then, the flame escaping the immense primary engines of the ship flared into a fireball, and the carrier sped off into the Cornerian atmosphere.

* * *

With a snap and a hiss, a grid shot up into the air.

Generated over a circular dais, the two dimensional field floated motionlessly, empty aside from the vertical and horizontal lines appearing at regular intervals. In the dim lights of the briefing room though, it still stood out clear, and the near-empty rows and columns cast a faint green glow on the ten pilots gathered around.

They were all in various states of relaxation, each finding a way to pass the time while they waiting for their leader to appear and begin the briefing. A few leaned quietly on the railings of the circular holo-projector, while others whispered brief conversations with each other. Most notably, however, was the individual who stood off to the side of the other ten gathered at the dais. Hidden by the shadow of the room, the figure has its back against the wall with its arms crossed, a foot resting flat against the steel plates of the wall. In the dim light, the unique chevrons of a Flight Sergeant on its shoulder could barely be seen.

All conversation stopped and all heads turned as the door to the room hissed open, allowing a shaft of bright hallway light to burst through. A shadow stepped into the light and the door closed behind it, admitting the figure as the eleventh into the room.

"First Sergeant present!" the noncom leaning against the wall shouted as she sprang to attention, saluting the figure as he stepped into the faint light cast off by the briefing dais.

The other nine occupants of the room followed suit with military precession, standing straight as a board with saluting arms bent at an exact angle.

"At ease guys," Bill responded, grinning lopsidedly, "I'm not an officer _yet_."

The ten pilots under his command followed orders and returned to a semi-relaxed state, each of the cadets with a hint of amusement creeping onto his or her visage.

The squadron leader moved to the console of the holo-projector and pulled out a small, credit-sized disk from his pocket, pushing it in the reader on the side of the machine. Placing his thumb on the pad for verification, he looked up at the image projected into mid-air as a small loading bar appeared in the middle of the grid. As the bar reached fully solid, it, along with the grid, disappeared and was replaced with an emblem of sorts.

It consisted of an upside-down dagger, flanked by a pair of Cornerian starfighters, seen from profile view with their noses pointed skyward. A simple, forest green, upside-down triangle, stretched vertically so that the tip lined up with the tip of the dagger, made up the background. The words "54th Cornerian Tactical Fighter Wing" appeared printed in bold, silver letters beneath the insignia as it floated in mid-air.

"Alright," Bill spoke at last as the emblem continued to rotate slowly in three dimensions, "Let's get this briefing underway. This will be mission oh-thirteen for Gamma Squadron of the fifty-fourth, commanded by First Lieutenant Calloway, with Flight Sergeants Haggerty, and Grey. First Flight Sergeant Grey presiding the briefing. It is currently…fourteen-thirty hours, Castle Base time." Bill breathed out and smiled, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, "Okay, now that the bureaucratic stuff's outta the way, let's get down to it."

The 54th Emblem faded and was replaced by a full map of the Lylat System. A bracket formed around the large, azure gas cloud that bore the uncanny shape of an 'X', and the holo-projector's image zoomed in to expand it. Now that the sector filled the entire space, imperfections and small arms of gas reaching away from the main cloud at irregular intervals could be seen. It was obvious that the sector was truly more of a standard freeform gas cloud that simply bore a coincidental similarity to the letter 'X' from far away. A small glowing dot appeared in the top left corner of the cloud as Bill began to speak.

"This operation will take place in Sector X, in the quadrant of the gas cloud closest to our Sun and Katina. It will be a standard escort mission for a clutch of Blue Arrow freighters to Yohan Depot." Though the gathered pilots managed to stay quiet, the sudden jump in the group's average heart rate seemed to echo through the room to their commander.

Bill sensed this with a nod, addressing what was undoubtedly on everyone's mind as he continued, "Now, I know everyone here has heard about what's been happening recently on our supply runs, and I understand your concern in regards to our mission. Trust me, my heart sank too when I received the news from higher up. But we're soldiers. We don't serve Corneria or the Planetary Coalition to bask in the easy missions and turn tail on the tough assignments."

"Permission to speak freely, sir," the sergeant who had alerted the room to Bill's arrival minutes before asked jarringly, barely allowing her superior to finish his sentence.

"Granted, as always, Haggerty," he responded, watching as the female wolf smoothly shifted her physical stance from one of silent observation to a more offensive posture. He braced himself for what he knew would be a candid opinion from the hot-tempered pilot.

"Grey, this is suicide," she said bluntly, gesturing with one hand with the other firmly planted on her hip, "Delta and Beta Squadrons were completely wiped out in the last two jaunts into that cloud; Delta with the support of gunboats. How could we_ possibly_ fare better?"

A faint murmur of concurrence swept through the small room as the other pilots of Gamma Squadron agreed with her. However, she bore no look of accomplishment or any indication that she acknowledged the fact that the rest of the squadron was behind her, nor did she show any signs of a boost in her confidence like most would express. Her concerns were purely professional. She could have cared less what the other nine pilots thought of her opinion.

"_I'm reminded yet again why you earned those chevrons_," Bill thought to himself before responding aloud, "Flight Sergeant Haggerty is right. Without support from something with some tonnage behind it, this would be pretty much a suicide mission. However, all of the Cornerian warships in the immediate area of Katina have been called off to join the hunt for the Warlords. And whether we like it or not, our little base here isn't exactly front line priority, so we can't expect any special assistance."

"Then what are we supposed to do?" Haggerty blurted out, briefly forgetting military protocol before she quickly recovered, "Er, _sir._"

"Well, our wing requisition officer has seen fit to throw some money at the problem in the hopes that it'll solve itself…like always," the First Flight Sergeant responded, adding the last phrase with a hint of annoyance, "…But for once, it might actually benefit us. I've used the additional funds to hire some outside help for the mission."

"Mercenaries, sir?"

"Correct, Flight Sergeant. I've already spoken with Lieutenant Calloway and we're in agreement on this one; third party support is the only way short of mobilizing the entire wing that we're gonna make it to Yohan alive and with the Blue Arrow cargo intact. Besides, this is the only way we can get our hands on a corvette sized warship, which, as you've already pointed out Haggerty, is key to preventing another…um…"

Bill trailed off and stopped for a moment, staring down into the softly glowing light of the holo-projector. A maelstrom of lights and colors greeted him as he gazed at the focusing crystal that produced the image above, the bright light causing fuzzy dots and clouds to blur his vision. He dipped his head and shook it clear as he leaned on the railing running around the side of the generator, gripping the banister tightly.

"Look," he began, bringing his vision to sweep across the entire squadron, "We all had friends in Beta and Delta, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous about the upcoming mission. In all honesty, chances are very good that we're not all going to make it back alive; hell, it's not as sure as I'd like it that _any _of us will." He tried to smile and laugh, but it came up a little short as he dipped his head again, "But something tells me we'll be able to complete the mission this time; that we can pick up where our fellow pilots left off-"

"Sir, I…I'm sorry," came a voice from amongst the pilots. "I can't do this. Permission to sit this one out, sir."

Bill's head shot up as the group of cadets parted, allowing the objecting soldier to stand by himself under the First Flight Sergeant's gaze. The silence that followed his words was absolute as the sole cadet stood separated from his surprised peers, alone in the faint light of the briefing room. Bill had stopped mid-sentence, allowing the pilot to speak his mind, but he wasn't sure how to proceed after he heard the objector's question. The Flight Sergeant's eyes widened a bit when a second pilot stepped into position behind the protestor, agreeing with similar words.

"Me too, sir; I can't-"

"Are you injured, soldier?" Haggerty asked of the original objector, stepping forward and allowing a hint of contempt into her voice as she cut off the second pilot. It didn't take an officer to realize that if nothing was said, the entire squadron would soon be behind the original objector. Spotting her superior's reluctance to reprimand, she gladly stepped forward to compensate.

"N-no, ma'am," he replied, shifting uneasily on his feet as he came under fire from the more intense wolf.

"Are you?" she asked of the second cadet, who responded with a similar negative response, "I didn't think so. You know military-"

"That's enough, Sergeant," Bill interrupted, drawing a terse but relenting look from his subordinate. He knew she hated to be called off the hunt once it had started, but he also knew open hostility wasn't the way to go about dealing with the current issue. Addressing the pair of cadets who still stood apart from the other seven, he spoke with a firm, even voice, "For what reason to you two want out? You have permission to speak your minds."

The first objector swallowed hard, gathering his courage and thoughts, "Flight Sergeant Grey, sir, you heard what Flight Sergeant Haggerty said; this mission is suicide."

"Well what did you expect when you signed up for service, cadet?" Bill asked, narrowing his eyes. "This is the military; you couldn't have expected you'd get through a tour without putting your life at risk."

"Absolutely sir, I fully expected it," the cadet replied, gaining confidence but losing his verbal footing when he glanced at Haggerty and saw the withering glare directed his way, "B-but I just…why? Why are we even doing this? We're going to sacrifice our lives so that some traders can make some extra pay on a dangerous run? Where's the reason in that?"

"I can understand sacrificing a life in the defense of a city, or protecting some a civilian transport," the second cadet spoke up, genuine concern and apprehension in her eyes, "But this? We've already sacrificed twenty four pilots and some support staff for no reason at all. Even if we do succeed, what is gained?"

"I can't tell you I know the answer to that question cadet," Bill said in a commanding tone, allowing his voice to take on a bit of an edge. It wasn't the easiest thing for the mild-mannered hound to do, but he knew he had to step up and take control. "But I can tell you this; we don't get paid for following logic. We're soldiers. We take commands and turn them into reality. That's as far as we go. I know the fear you're feeling right now; I've felt it many times before." He glanced back and forth at the two offending cadets as he finished, "But part of being in the military is owning up to the fear and not letting it control you. Unless you want to turn in your wings now and submit to court martial, request denied soldier. Both of you."

The pair of cadets, particularly the one who was more outspoken, sank almost physically when they heard the final command. They slunk back into the rest of pilots of the squadron, staying near the back of the group out of both embarrassment and a need to be away from any of their superior's range of vision. There was a period of murmuring before the First Flight Sergeant got their attention and returned silence to the room.

"Is there anyone else with concerns about this assignment?" he asked, pausing several moments to make sure there were none. The disruption had thrown him off a good deal, but pushing past it onto something he knew how to handle seemed like the best way to proceed."Good; on to the briefing…"

* * *

Thank you again to everyone who's sticking with this story, even though I tend to update kinda...erratically. And a special gracias to Northern-megas and RedBay for reviewing.

To RedBay in particular, one of the things you brought up in your review was that I tend to repeat things a lot, that I can be redundant in this sense. I certainly can't argue that, looking back over a lot of my chapters, but in the past, I've been criticized for being vague with the action that I'm trying to depict. I suppose that my repeating of myself is just me swinging too far in the other direction; over-compensating for any vagueness in my descriptions by beating it into the reader's head several times over. I'll try my best to correct this and find a nice middle-ground in the future.

As a sidenote, I know a problem I've been having recently is that my chapters tend to jump around a lot. I just wanted to let y'all know that I'm working on this, and that this should be the last chapter that has more than two or three "jumps" in the plot.

As always all opinions, good or bad, are welcome. Let me know what you think!

* * *


	9. Chapter 9: Passenger

**IX: **_Passenger_

"Captain Hartford of the _C.N.S. Broadsword_, reporting in, sir."

He added his voice to the lineup of other vessel commanders as they reported in with similar messages, all of them appearing stiff and formal on their own respective screens of the _Broadsword's _command room. Hartford knew that each of the dozen or so other commanders were sitting in similar rooms by themselves on their respective ships, and that they were all participating in what amounted to a large conference call, but just for a moment, the young captain liked the thought of his view of everyone being unique, and that they were all reporting to him.

The Fleet Admiral's speech from the center screen cut into his delusions of grandeur though, and Hartford snapped to attention.

"At ease, men," the older husky commanded. Fleet Admiral Gage was certainly getting on in years, but his eyes were still sharp as they surveyed each of the virtual commanders before him. He bore the hard expression of one who didn't take a single thing in his life lightly; his mouth was eternally fixed in an evaluating frown and his voice was deep and textured. His uniform was adorned with every commendation one could imagine, and several that were special issue.

By contrast, Hartford was as fresh-faced and youthful as a fleet cadet straight out of the academy. His uniform was occupied only by the pre-requisite indicators of rank and fleet assignment, and the few medals he did wear were considered the bare minimum for achieving his current rank. His ears were perked and his face was intent on the Admiral's words, hoping to appear to fit in with the rest of the Seventh Fleet's officers, all of which were, with a single exception, at least half a decade older than he.

"Our fleet is approaching Zoness, and from there we're going to move straight on to Sector Z without stopping for resupply. You've all been supplied with additional tactical fuel tanks, so this shouldn't be an issue." He paused then and sat waiting for a moment, as if daring one of the officers to raise a question or issue. When nobody did, he nodded and continued, pleased, "Good. Our forward communications frigate has already made contact with our observation post planet side, and they've reported a large amount of covert activity within the gas cloud. Our intelligence appears to be correct, it seems."

"Upon arrival in Sector Z, I want to split the fleet into two task groups to cover more ground, so to speak." The admiral's picture was suddenly resized to occupy only half of the center screen in Hartford's command room, the other half now covered with a collection of vessel wireframes and information. The older husky went on, "I will take the main fleet to what has been deemed the most likely hiding spot for Warlord Bauker, while Commander Bishop will head the smaller, secondary task force to scour our flanks."

A hare, just slightly older than Hartford, acknowledged the command with a firm affirmative. The younger husky glanced up at the hare's screen in his command room and nodded unconsciously; Bishop was the same hare with whom he had made acquaintance during and after the High Admiral Markiss' briefing a few days prior. He was glad to have someone he knew in the same fleet.

"Wing Commander Rashik," Gage continued, "I want you to take your command squadron and two others and redistribute them amongst Commander Bishop's ships. There should be enough room if you utilize all of the emergency hangers and docking slips."

"Yes, sir," the wing commander, a grey vulpine who bore the faint scars and harsh demeanor of a career soldier replied.

"Good," the Admiral finished, "Your task group assignments will be issued shortly; as soon as you receive them I expect your command ship and all supporting vessels to report immediately to either myself or Commander Bishop. Fleet Admiral Gage, out."

* * *

The _Great _Fox'shanger was abuzz with activity as all four members of the Star Fox team were hard at work, the sounds of labor echoing through the docking bay.

Fox and Falco had taken it upon themselves to move all of their newly acquired ordinance from the temporary storage racks to the more permanent, and less exposed magazines within the walls of the _Great Fox_. Several large panels sat open with empty racks extended, a few of the slots occupied by older missiles and rockets yet to be used, while far more were bare and waiting to be filled. It took both mercenaries to hobble one of the new warheads into the waiting niche, and the job was proceeding slowly.

Slippy, lacking both the brawn and height to be of any use lugging the missiles, had instead occupied himself happily by leaping headfirst into the dissection of the cockpit of the wrecked fighter. His red billed hat could barely be seen as he was exploring the underside of the cockpit dashboard, but every once in a while, he would check in by squealing with joy upon the discovery of some intact avionic system or another.

And finally, Peppy, pulling his elder status for once, sat comfortably on the middle rung of one of the access ladders used when the team needed to board their Arwing fighters, casually flipping through the pages of a carbon copy of the day's _Cornerian Times_. His reading glasses nestled on the tip of his nose, his jacket buttoned shut against the imagined cold, and grunting a hearty 'harrumph' after every editorial that dared disagree with him, he served his age demographic well.

"Okay, so, tell me again why _we're _breaking our backs over here and not ROB?" Falco called out to nobody in particular as he and Fox heaved another warhead into its proper slot. "I mean, that's what we got 'im for, right?"

"Because I think it does one good to complete an honest shift of hard work, Falco," Peppy responded, not even looking up from his reading as he turned another page.

"Besides," Fox added, grinning and wiping the sweat from his brow as he and the avian walked back to the next temporary rack of missiles, "Aren't you the one always complaining how we never have anything to do around here?"

"Well _yeah,_" Falco said, straining his voice in time with his body as they slowly lifted another missile, "But this isn't exactly what I had in mind. I was thinking, ya know, downloading a movie database, or setting up a flight simulator, or something that didn't – watch your foot there – end with me in a back splint."

Fox chuckled as they shifted their missile up, pausing to get their full strength behind it, and pushing it up onto the topmost slot of the current internal rack they were filling. It landed with a heavy _thud _on the lip of the niche, but an extra push by Falco let it roll into the groove it was supposed to fall into. Satisfied with their work, Fox opened the manual control panel for the internal rack on the hanger wall, punching in a code and getting a green flashing light in return.

"This one's done," he reported with a sigh, watching with approval as the internal rack retracted into the walls of the _Great Fox_, taking the missiles with it and sealing itself shut behind the grey, metal panels.

"Alright, I vote for a break," Falco said, exhausted, staggering to the wing of his own Arwing and boosting himself up and onto it with one last ounce of strength.

"Aw, really?" Peppy asked with a smirk, finally looking up from his paper at the avian perched on the Arwing next to the access ladder he was sitting on, "But you guys just started."

"Pah," Fox snorted as he took a seat on the floor of the hanger facing the hare, his back against the landing gear of Falco's Arwing, "If we just started, then you're still on the first page."

Peppy glanced down at the newspaper in his hands, noting that the amount gripped in his left hand far outweighed the amount in his right, indicating how far he was through the publication. "Touché," he admitted with a grin.

"By the way, Pep," Fox went on, readjusting himself against the metal landing strut, "I never got a chance to ask back on Corneria, but how'd that query to the Galactic Directory go?"

"Yeah," Falco chimed in, swinging his feet in the air, "Find out anything about our mystery chick?"

"Not as much as I would've liked," Peppy replied, scratching his chin, "To get anywhere with that system, you have to have a person's picture, identification, citizen's number…a whole laundry list of ways to ID someone. Physical descriptions could've worked, but do you know how many 'female, spotted, lynx' pilots there are out there?"

"Um…fifty," Falco quipped, throwing a number he picked out of nowhere. He knew he wasn't actually being asked, but it was the sort of unnecessary comment he lived for.

"Close," the hare replied, glancing up at the avian, still perched on his fighter's wing, "Just throw a couple of zeroes on the back and you got it."

"Well, who was the name at the top of the list?" Fox asked. His ears perked as a rattling from the destroyed fighter's cockpit caught his attention, but he quickly refocused on Peppy.

"Miyu!" Slippy called from the broken cockpit, poking his head out as he entered the conversation and standing his tallest, which wasn't saying much.

"No, no," Peppy said, brushing away the toad's suggestion, "The top of the list wasn't that. It was something more like 'Sheryl' or 'Sammy'…'Sarah'? Something with an 's'… certainly not an 'm'."

"No Peppy," Slippy responded, waiving a small card in the air with same excitement of a child with a new found treasure, "I _mean_, the ID card says 'Miyu' on it. Here, come check it out; I just found it."

Fox and Falco looked at each other, getting up and jumping down from their respective positions and jogging across the hanger to where the toad stood, still in the cockpit. Peppy took a moment to neatly fold his paper before pushing himself off the ladder and making his own, less hurried way over to the rest of the team. Fox snatched the card from the ecstatic toad, flipping it right-side up in his hands before locking in on the name next to the picture.

"Huh," he remarked, handing the card to Peppy, "Well whatdya know? She's officially got a name now."

"Yeah," Falco agreed, "Now we can stop calling her 'that stupid lynx girl'."

"Real original name by the way," Fox added.

"Well thanks; I thought it was accurate enough."

"There doesn't seem to be a surname," Peppy commented, flipping the card over and back in his hands, assuming a quizzical look, "That's sort of strange. The ID card's obviously been forged then, but it seems like an odd thing to omit; even unnamed orphans are given last names by the government."

"Well she was a hired gun for whatever smuggling crew she flew for," Fox pondered out loud, "Isn't it possible that she chose to give the card maker only a limited amount of info?"

"Yeah," Slippy agreed, his normally squeaky voice still aggravated with excitement from his find, "It could even be a fake identity, too. Smugglers seem like the kind of people who could use more than one guise in their line of work."

"That's true," Peppy admitted, "But seeing as we don't have anything else to call her for the moment, I think the name on her ID should suffice."

"And realistically, what're the chances we'll even see her again?" Fox asked the crew rhetorically, shrugging. There seemed to be a general consensus of agreement as they nodded to his suggestion. "Good find Slippy," he continued, taking the ID card from the hare and handing it back to the toad, who accepted it eagerly, "Why don't ya put it with that bag and the rest of the stuff you guys found earlier, in the storage room."

"Can do!" he replied with a smile, straightening his cap and making his way down from the cockpit, careful to avoid the bits of broken material still embedded in the rim where the windshield once was. As soon as he finally touched the deck, he was off towards the hanger door.

The crew watched Slippy go, amused at the enthusiasm he had been expressing in the short time since finding the ID card. As if his ridiculous grin wasn't enough, the team mechanic's normally short gait was even further shortened and quickened, belaying his excitement for a discovery that, in retrospect, was bound to happen regardless of his own input. Of course, the Star Fox team had no intention of mentioning that part. They were content to let the toad have his moment in the sun.

"Like a kid with a lollipop," Falco commented, shaking his head and smiling as he crossed his arms with only the faintest hint of mockery.

"I could use a lollipop," Fox said out loud to himself absentmindedly, his gaze turning from the closed hanger door to a random spot on the wall as he began to stare off into some imagined distance. Falco grunted in agreement, and a for a moment they just stood there, before Peppy sighed and resumed his position on the access ladder, picking up his paper and calmly placing his reading glasses back on their perch just under his eyes.

"You know, sometimes I find it hard to believe that you two are technically adults now," he said, shaking his head and flicking the paper to get it to sit straight in his hands, "Break's over, by the way."

* * *

"There's the convoy; form up on your flight leaders and link up with your designated transports."

A chorus of affirmative responses resounded over the comm. Twelve crimson engines trails blazed forth from the atmosphere of Katina, homing in on a quartet of rectangular transports moored at a stationary docking bar. Normally reserved for larger tankers and freighters which were too large to actually land on the planet, the geo-synchronous moors had been especially reserved for Gamma Squadron's assignment.

Over the communication equipment, Bill could hear the Lieutenant talking with one of the transport captains. The long, drawn out syllables of the latter clearly identified him as a native of Katina, sporting a characteristic, flavorful drawl.

"...see you Calloway, but it seems like you fellas are forgetting some of that extra firepower you promised."

"Not at all sir; additional forces are going to meet us just outside Sector X."

"Is that right? Well then saddle up; we've got a deadline to catch."

"Roger, sir."

The starfighters were close enough to the transports that Bill decided to activate his own comlink, setting the channel to communicate only with the three pilots under his direct command that made up his flight. Their three portraits popped up on his heads-up display, stacked on top of each other along the left side of his cockpit screen. The standard issue pilot's helmets that each wore bore the insignia of Corneria on the left side, as well as the emblem for the 54th Cornerian Tactical Fighter Wing on the right. The deep green hilt of the dagger in the latter was the only thing that set these particular helmets aside from those of the pilots' peers.

"Listen up Green Flight," Bill spoke, keeping his voice informal, "Our ride is Blue Arrow Freighter Omega Two, up there on the left. Latch on to the center spar with your magnetic clamps, just behind the cockpit. Don't worry about formation, but you better like the view you choose; we may get to Sector X faster by piggybacking on these guys, but it's still a hell of a long trip."

"Aye, sir," they all responded with almost simultaneous salutes, their portraits blinking off in turn until Bill's HUD was as empty as it had been before.

Bill sighed. Ever since he had been placed in a position of command over other pilots, and especially after being promoted to _First _Flight Sergeant, the hound had stressed the fact that he liked to keep things casual. There was a time and place for military protocol, and he would be the first to defend the notion of it in the proper instances. But when pilots were about to go into battle, with death and personal injury hanging over their heads, why shouldn't they be allowed to ease up and relieve the tension a little? More often than not though, he found himself at odds with the behavior traditionally befitting someone of his rank by following this philosophy.

Granted, he wasn't actually an officer yet, merely an elevated ensign. He tried not to dwell on the fact that his duties as a First Flight Sergeant, Executive Officer of Gamma Squadron, and 54th Wing Civilian Adjunct were more numerous and time-consuming than half the officers in the unit. Instead, he focused on giving off an easy going, casual nature. The only problem was that neither side of the rank gap seemed willing to work with him on de-formalizing such events as briefings, and even basic pilot-to-pilot banter; officers weren't willing to let go of the unquestioning respect their positions granted, and cadets were still brainwashed from basic training into giving it unflinchingly.

"I just wish someone would at least crack a smile once in a while_," _he said out loud to nobody as he guided his fighter towards his designated transport.

Chopping back on the throttle, Bill's thin, agile CDF Fighter slowed smoothly to a crawl, angling up slightly and coming to a complete stop once it was directly over the freighter's cockpit. He activated the reverse thrust, and his recently dormant engine began to glow softly as he drifted aft. Counting the meter length hull panels of the vessel beneath him, he reached a distance he assumed to be far enough from the transport cockpit, and stopped. He spared a glance at his radar and noticed that the dozens of dots present just moments before were beginning to congeal into a handful, and then four as the other squadron members were docking with their own freighters.

He reached up and toggled a switch, sending a shiver through his craft as the landing gear lowered and snapped into position. Dropping in relative altitude, he braced for the controlled impact he knew was coming, keeping a firm grip on the stick. Then a jolt stopped the fighter cold as the landing pads touched down, metal scraping on metal as the recoil slowly repelled his ship up again. Reaching up and toggling a second switch, directly adjacent to the first, Bill activated the electro-magnetic clamps located in the landing gear pads with a faint, distant hum.

With a solid thud, his CDF Fighter touched down and stayed down, granting his ship a final resting place and his cockpit a clear view of Katina's atmosphere in front of the transport, hindered only by the slight rise of the transport's own control center. Twisting in his chair and glancing out into space behind him, he saw two of his three direct subordinates touching down behind him, while a premature shudder from the freighter told him the third had just hooked up where the pilot could not be seen, probably underneath.

Tapping the activation pad of his communications console, Bill opened a channel to Gamma Squadron's Lieutenant. A box for his portrait popped up in the center of his HUD and fled to the bottom left corner, but it remained blacked out for a few moments while the transmission awaited clearance on the officer's end. Bill took the opportunity to clear his throat; Lieutenant Calloway was a no-nonsense kind of person, and the least the First Flight Sergeant wanted to do was have his voice crack on him. It only took a few more seconds for the portrait in Bill's HUD to snap from black to color as the Lieutenant's portrait took the box over.

"Yes, Flight Sergeant?" the cougar asked, already guessing what Bill was reporting in for, but asking the question because protocol demanded he, the superior, speak first.

"Green Flight is securely docked to Freighter Omega Two, sir," the hound conveyed with an even voice, "We're set to ride this can out of here as soon as everyone else is."

"Glad to hear it Grey," Calloway replied, "Flight Sergeant Haggerty just reported in a moment ago; seems Red Flight beat you to it this time." The Lieutenant smiled, his middle-aged visage taking the expression with just a hint of weariness. He knew that Bill's Green Flight and Haggerty's Red Flight had an unofficial rivalry going, and considering the seriousness of the mission at hand, he figured a little light-heartedness couldn't hurt.

"Eh, I'd rather beat her where it counts Lieutenant," Bill said, grinning in return, glad for something to take his mind off the danger of the mission he'd soon face, "Tally the kill count after the mission and tell me where we stand after that."

"I'll be sure to do that Grey," he responded in stride, reaching towards his own communications console, "We'll be leaving shortly; Calloway out." The Lieutenant's picture winked out of existence on Bill's HUD, and it once again returned to its previously empty state, appearing to be nothing more than a standard cockpit windshield.

The First Flight Sergeant arched his back and stretched his arms as much as he could in his cramped quarters, tensing his entire body until it was completely drawn out. With a sigh of contentment, he relaxed, allowing his muscles to return to their dormant state and his hands to slip behind his head, acting as an extra layer of comfort between his helmet and his head rest. Straining his eyes up without moving his cranium, he spied the visor of his helmet in his vertical peripheral. Breathing out again, he canted his head, cracking his neck before reaching up and pulling his helmet off, letting it fall to the cockpit floor beneath his legs.

"_Got a good long trip ahead of us," _he thought as he pushed back into his chair, closing his eyes, "_Mine-as-well get comfortable."_ He placed a hand on his head, letting his fingers sink between the short locks of messy hair, and mussed it, shaking out the helmet's smothering effect. Very few could spot the point where his fur ended and his hair began due to their identical grey color, but he just didn't feel right with a head full of helmet hair.

He heard the Lieutenant announcing the mission time and marking its beginning, knowing that it was an audio only message and not worrying about his relaxed posture. The CDF Fighter jerked backwards as the freighter it was attached to disembarked from the docking moor, though the hound was expecting this and barely felt it. If he had his eyes open, he would've seen the gently spinning world of Katina slide soundlessly out of sight, replaced instead by a field of stars and a distant dark blue gas cloud. But he didn't, so he couldn't see the other freighters and his own creating a loose rhombus formation, nor could he witness the flaring of their engines.

He could, however, feel the rumble of their industrial thrusters as it shuddered up through his fighter's landing pads. It would take awhile before they would reach their maximum cruising speed, so Bill knew he could look forward to a smooth, serene ride. It was the kind of voyage that made him wish his command chair could recline even the slightest bit, but he knew all too well that they were made for function, not comfort. Still, he sunk lower into the fabric, trying to get cozy enough to drift off; it was the easiest and most common way to deal with the long travel time.

Before he could though, a chime rang through his cockpit, followed closely by rapid flashes of light from his communications console. Opening one eye and spying the source of the light, he considered ignoring it briefly before opening the other eye and reaching forward, granting the incoming call. Another portrait unfolded in the bottom left corner of his HUD, appearing immediately and revealing the miniaturized face and upper body of Flight Sergeant Haggerty.

"Sir," she began formally, even throwing a salute in with her greeting, "Permission to speak freely about the upcoming mission."

Bill smiled, wondering how many times since he had been promoted he had said the words he spoke next, "Granted, as always Flight Sergeant." He reached over and tapped a switch, changing the border of the Flight Sergeant's portrait from the standard grey to gold, indicating a switch to a private transmission. At the same time he moved the talking picture itself, centering it in his HUD and expanding it to take up most of the center of the cockpit windshield.

Now that picture was large enough to take in details, Bill saw that the darker grey furred wolf had already settled in for the long ride ahead. Her helmet wasn't present on her head, presumably placed in the tiny leg well of the fighter like his own. Without it, the shock of brightly dyed red and orange hair it revealed contrasted sharply with the rest of her fur, sloping to a shallow point that rose even with her ears. It was a fairly androgynous style from the front, but Bill knew from previous casual encounters that the mane continued backward and down, the colored tresses falling to the small of her back, with hair periodically gathered into spikes that arched outward, granting the appearance of a series of thick, almost reptilian spines jutting out from her own. A single braid fell across her shoulder, resting on the forest green and grey jumpsuit that was standard amongst the pilots of Gamma Squadron.

She paused, glancing slightly off to the right as she gathered her words. It was a small movement, but Bill picked up on it as something that the Flight Sergeant wouldn't have done outside the privacy of her own cockpit. It was a subtle gesture that betrayed her uncertainty, the last thing most would expect the quick tempered pilot to express. Bill became genuinely interested in the conversation that was about to unfold; the fact that something had shaken her enough to contact him for what he assumed would be reassurance had, if not his concern as a friend, his curiosity piqued.

"Grey…tell me we're not flying to our deaths here," she said, glancing at him but not moving her head. "Tell me we actually had an excuse to shame those kids back in the briefing room for wanting to bail out on this one."

"I wish I could Rhena," Bill replied, offering a half-smile that quickly faded into neutrality. A shudder ran up to the cockpit through his fighter as the freighter it was attached to sputtered as it continued to accelerate. He shrugged, "You know the drill though, better than any of the cadets here. Runs that are considered 'low risk' can turn out to be death traps, and sorties that are suicide flights can turn out to be cakewalks. We might get lucky this time."

"I'd rather not put faith in luck," Haggerty snorted, flicking her eyes to the side as she smirked, "What about your merc friends? How much do you know about them?"

"Plenty," the First Flight Sergeant answered, reminiscing about the Star Fox team, unable to keep a grin from spreading across his muzzle, "I went to Flight School with the guy who leads the team; they're a solid outfit, even if they are a little on the short-staffed side of things. You wouldn't know it from the official reports, but they helped out big time during the Lylat War."

"And they've got the firepower to help us out here?" she asked inquisitively, raising an eyebrow. "I don't know too much about the whole private military business, but I'd think it'd be tough for a small team to come by enough credits to buy your own frigate. _Legally_, of course."

"I've always wondered that myself, actually," Bill admitted, shrugging again. "But yeah, in any case, they're good people, so no worries about that. And I've got a good feeling about this time; I think we should be fine."

"I hope you're right Grey," Haggerty sighed, reaching up with one hand and scratching something just before her colorful hairline, "I hope you're right."

* * *

"I'll be right back guys; I'm gonna check up on Slippy real quick."

"Oh _sure_ McCloud; take another break. I can move these things by myself, no problem," Falco called as Fox stood in the doorway of the _Great Fox's_ hanger, "Yeah, sure, don't worry about poor Falco Lombardi, carrying the missiles that weight twice as much as I do. Yeah, not a single thing wrong in this picture, nuh-uh…"

Fox laughed as he walked through the door, letting it close behind him and cut off the avian's complaints. While his primary reason for leaving for a moment was genuinely to see what was holding Slippy up, he couldn't complain about the respite it would afford him from hauling the warheads.

He walked down the hallway a few yards and paused at the threshold to the empty room the team used for storage. The door slid open as soon as it detected the vulpine's presence, admitting him to the space contained within. The lack of a locking mechanism on the door, or most of the other doors on the _Great Fox_, didn't faze any of the team much; the general consensus was that very few outsiders would be aboard the vessel anyway, so it didn't make much sense to spend credits on internal security. Not when so many other investments needed the attention so much more, in any case.

The storage room was dark and silent, two things that Fox least expected from the area where Slippy was presumably putting his prized ID card find away. Faint green status lights from storage crates pulsed a slow and steady rhythm of fading and growing intensity, but they weren't nearly enough to navigate by. Fox still stood at the entrance to the room, surprised and slightly suspicious. There was something that just wasn't right about the situation, and as he thought about it, the paranoia grew.

He suddenly realized that all sound had faded away; it even seemed like the running _thrum _of the _Great Fox_'s engines wasn't present to comfort him. Aside from the gradually blinking lights, not a single thing moved. Fox himself was afraid to budge, in case whatever action he took broke the eerie stillness of the storage closet. So he simply stood there, too wary of some imagined ghost to move forward into the room or back into the hallway, and too apprehensive to settle his suddenly racing pulse. The fur on the back of his neck stood on end, and a chill abruptly ran down his spine. His heartbeat throbbed loudly.

"_There's something not right…here" _Fox thought, getting the distinct feeling someone, or something, was watching him. He called out, "Slippy?"

A row of status lights against the far wall appeared to quickly blink on and off. It didn't take a moment for Fox to realize that those status lights hadn't changed their pulsing rhythm one bit; it was something getting in the way, blocking their light for a split second. He heard a low whistle.

Fox arched his spine as time seemed to slow. Bending backwards, he saw something flash through the space his head had occupied a moment before. He felt the wind as it tore by. However, he had no time to react beyond that, as he felt a boot plant itself in his stomach, sending the vulpine staggering back into the corridor. Before he could recover, he sensed something metallic and heavy just as it came in contact with his muzzle and he let his head roll to the side, absorbing some of the blow as he lurched backward. His back slammed against the hallway wall as he reeled with surprise and pain, instinctively holding his palm against his cheek and feeling the thick, sickeningly warm blood leaking forth as if from a faucet. A vicious cough racked his torso and he spit crimson liquid onto the floor. His eyes rolled up toward the door as his posture faltered and he fell into a crouch.

On impulse, Fox drew his handgun from its thigh holster and leveled it at the storage room door, his hand tightening on the trigger as his entire body tensed. Just as it drew a bead though, a figure emerged from the darkness with startling speed, and the mercenary again felt the sharp, jarring pain of steel on flesh as the assailant's blunt weapon connected with his wrist, sending his pistol skittering across the floor to the closed hanger door. He howled in pain and jumped to the side, away from the direction his own weapon had taken. In doing so, he narrowly avoided another swing from the figure, and the clang of metal on the hallway wall rang out in the corridor.

He recovered his rhythm as he spun and shuffled backward a few steps, putting a few meters between himself and his attacker and allowing himself time to size up his opponent.

The black shirt and spotted arms seemed to call out at him, instantly identifying the lynx as the girl whose fighter currently sat in pieces in the docking bay a door away. However, unlike the last time Fox saw her, she bore no signs of weakness in her dark blue eyes as she darted forward, closing the small gap between him and her. She gripped the heavy-duty wrench in her right hand with her left, raising it as she neared for another two-handed strike.

"M-miyu! Stop!" Fox shouted as his emerald irises shot open, stuttering with surprise as the lynx glared at him, smoothly striding towards the retreating vulpine. He could've stopped his back step and snapped off a kick quick enough to catch her off guard, but his mind was still swimming with confusion and a hesitancy to retaliate against the girl who had less than a month before been comatose in his med bay.

If she heard what he said though, she didn't show it as she continued to close ground, flicking her wrist and swinging the wrench at Fox's head with a grunt of exertion, causing a low whistle as the air filtered though the tiny holes in the tool. The vulpine instinctively planted his feet and threw out his left arm to block the blow, but he immediately regretted it as the steel impacted bone, sending vibrations of the blow echoing through his body.

He tried to recover, flailing out with his right arm and striking low and at her core, but she neatly sidestepped the attack, bringing her weapon around as she did, the metal flashing in the bright hallway lights. Fox watched as the weapon neared his unprotected face, ducking only at the last possible second, removing his visage from danger but consequently placing the crown of his head in line with the wrench. It struck home just about his left temple, sending him sprawling to the ground and a flicker flashing through his vision. He continued a roll backward with the momentum, scrambling to his feet just in time to narrowly dodge a quick jab to the gut.

Fox's mind raced. "_That's not possible"_ he thought, noting the lynx's complete lack of apparent injury, weeks before a proper hospital stay would allow her to move like she had been without extreme pain. It struck him that she had to be on painkillers, which didn't seem like an important enough realization to devote more brainpower to, given his dire situation.

He shook the dull, throbbing sting from his wrist and ducked under a swipe to the head, bending forward enough that he had to support himself on the floor with his right arm. Using the extra leverage to spring backwards again, he continued to dodge and weave around the lynx's attacks, but even the lightest brush with the heavy wrench would sap more of his endurance. It was only a matter of time before he either ran out of room in the hallway to retreat, or he simply couldn't evade anymore and succumbed to her attacks.

Then it hit him, even as he deflected an unexpected kick with his battered forearm, stopping his back step briefly to block. Painkillers may have erased the agonizing hurt of the lynx's injuries, but not the injuries themselves. Underneath her hard expression, he knew that her body still bore the scars of his own doing back in the Meteos asteroid field. All he had to do was exploit them.

Again, Fox planted and tensed, his sharp eyes catching the trajectory of the wrench as it came around again. His hands shot up, snatching the business end of the weapon inches from his face and bringing it to a halt as he and the lynx entered a standoff.

The wrench shook in their grips as they strained against each other. But while the lynx's face was contorted with effort and quiet murmurs of a struggling voice spilled from her clenched teeth, Fox's features remained calm. He had regained control, and while his arms were badly bruised from blocking, his head was back where it should've been at the beginning of the fight. He watched and waited for an opportunity to present itself as they continued to grapple with the wrench.

Then he saw it. A shiver ran down her left shoulder and she redoubled her effort, finally making headway in the form of the weapon moving centimeters closer to Fox's cheek. Without hesitation, he leaned back, letting the wrench fall forward and carry the lynx's body with it from the over-exertion. It continued to the ground, matched by a grunt from the lynx. The vulpine twisted his body to the left, lashing out with his right leg and tagging her exposed shoulder with a vicious round kick.

Even as he made contact though, he winced.

Her reaction was almost frightening. A piercing scream ripped through the hallway as her shoulder socket impacted under the powerful strike, her left arm now hanging limp. The wrench was still gripped weakly by her right hand, but it abruptly clanged to the floor as pain tore through her nervous system. Her tendons seized up and her muscles refused to stretch as she was paralyzed by the hurt. Pain seemed to erupt from every possible nerve ending as the biostimulants finally wore off, removing the mask of comfort from her body's nerves and allowing the crippling pain to return in force.

Fox was amazed she still kept to her feet as her body literally shook with tremors, her right hand somehow making its way to her left shoulder. Her face was twisted in agony, her blue eyes welling up and screaming for mercy, even as her teeth remained clenched tight enough to prevent any verbal cry. The mercenary felt the weight of those eyes as they bore down on him; they seemed to crackle with arcs of lightening.

He suddenly realized it wasn't just his imagination. Jolts of tiny, fluorescent blue electricity jumped across her face, spreading forth from the back of her head. She faltered as she took a step forward, her eyes rolling up as if she were trying to stare the ceiling. Her shaking abruptly stopped, and she fell to her knees, all semblance of control lost.

Fox saw what was happening and leapt forward, sliding on his knees and catching her in his hands as she pitched forward to the ground, twisting and leading with her shoulder. Her head fell softly against his empty thigh holster, even as her limp left arm bounced on the floor and came to a halt at an unnatural angle. Finally, she came to a rest and stopped her shaking and trembling. Finally, sweet, numbing unconsciousness once again overtook her.

Fox looked up, past where she had stood, at the doorway to the hanger at the opposite end of the hall.

Falco stood with the vulpine's pistol leveled, a thin wisp of smoke rising from the heated barrel.

"Hey Foxie," he called out, not breaking his stance as Peppy edged past him and rushed into the storage room, "Since when do you keep your blaster on stun?"

* * *

Hm; that scene was fun to write. Thank you to all of you reading this right now, and a special thank you to Kavi, Dark Vengeance, and Redbay for their respective reviews. You guys make it fun to write this!

Also, as a quick aside to Redbay, the quote I kinda stole from you in this chapter ("stupid lynx girl") was only used because I laughed when I saw it in your review and thought it'd fit Falco's thought processes well. No barbs intended :)

Thanks again guys!


	10. Chapter 10: Proposal

**X****: **_Proposal_

"You're damn lucky I was training to be a medic when your Dad befriended me; damn lucky."

Fox breathed in sharply as another stitch lanced its way through his flesh, emerging a half-inch away and drawing the folds of skin it connected slightly closer. The thread was clear, and would be near invisible against the white fur of his cheek, but not being able to see the stitching certainly didn't alleviate the pain any. He winced again as the needle punctured again, and the thread slid gratingly through the hole in his skin behind it. His tail was raised in apprehension, and flicked every time he felt the jolt of pain. This wasn't how he had planned spending the downtime on the trip to Sector X.

"You sure you can't spare any more numbing stuff?" Fox asked, working his tongue around the stitches and consequently slurring his speech. If he heard Peppy's comment as the elder worked on the vulpine's face, he chose to ignore it.

"Not while she's still coming around," the hare replied, jerking a thumb back towards the lynx as she lay, still and attached to a rebreather, on the same table of the med bay she had occupied about a month before. He strained his voice slightly as he yanked another stitch through Fox's tough pelt, "Besides, I'm almost done. Now if you stop complaining, you can still get a lollipop from the nurse over there."

Fox rolled his eyes as Peppy grinned and nodded his head towards and implied ROB, who was attending the instruments near Miyu. Despite his discomfort, he couldn't help but crack a smile at that, though he immediately wished he hadn't as he felt the thread of the stitching dig into his cheek. Peppy shooed away the orange-furred hand that had reflexively reached up towards the wound. Fox sighed and complied, wincing in anticipation as the needle poked through again. Trying to take his mind off the tiny shocks of pain, he glanced around the tiny med bay, noticing the surprising lack of sound and movement coming from the third and final table in the room.

Slippy sat silently, holding an icepack to his head and staring blankly towards the ground. He swung his stubby legs like a child, but he had none of the child-like excitement or eagerness in his eyes that he normally possessed. He would cough on occasion, and sometimes look up to watch what ROB was doing over at the lynx's station, but other than that, he just stared at the ground, complacent in every way. Fox lowered his voice as Peppy paused and peered closer to inspect his handiwork.

"Hey Peppy," the vulpine whispered, careful not to look at Slippy as he was speaking, though he doubted the toad would even care if he heard in his current state, "How's Slippy holdin' up?"

"Oh, he'll be fine," Peppy responded, threading the needle through one more time, eliciting a final wince from Fox, "I found him in the storage room after you found our stowaway. She did quite a number on his head, but it's nothing worse than a mild concussion. He should be back to himself in a few days."

One last tug and the stitches were set. Fox sighed as if he had just put down a tremendous weight and he lifted his hand to his cheek, running his fingers over the small bumps of the thread. Peppy leaned back and stood straight, peeling off his sterilized gloves and throwing them, and the needle, into the waste chute embedded in the counter than ran the sides of the med bay. The excess thread he rolled back onto the spool and placed in a cupboard.

"All set Fox," he said, grinning from a job well done. Seeing the vulpine's curiosity with his newly dressed wound though, Peppy frowned. "Now, I'd think you're old enough by now for me to not have to tell you not to pick at it, but then, I have my doubts. So…"

"I'm not gonna pick at it," Fox replied with a smirk, jumping down from the table and stretching his arms. Glancing around the room, and seeing Slippy still staring at the ground, he chose instead to investigate the other silent occupant of the room, striding over and hoping up on the counter across from the cot. "So how's Miyu doing?"

Peppy crossed the room to stand beside ROB, who was adjusting switches and knobs on the various monitoring instruments set in place around the lynx's cot. "Physically speaking, all the pieces have been put in place. Er, _back _in place, as it were. ROB reset her shoulder, for the second time," he said, adding the last phrase under his breath as he crossed his arms, "We've set her right hand in a temporary cast of sorts, just to be safe, and we've used the last of our Epsilon Solution to help finish the regenerative process her hospital stay must've started."

"So why isn't she up?"

"Well, that's the thing; physically she shouldn't have any problem with consciousness; we just have to wait for her mind to reboot itself." Peppy explained, canting his head to the side, "A stun bolt to the back of the head isn't exactly gentle on the brain though. Add to that physical exhaustion, the lack of food and water over the last day and a half, an overdose of biostimulants-"

"Whoa whoa; hold up," Fox interrupted, staring at Peppy, "Did you say 'overdose'? She OD'd?"

"According to the limited blood test we took," the hare replied, tapping ROB on the shoulder. "ROB, how much of the biostimulant was in our subject's bloodstream?"

The robot answered in his trademark monotonous voice, not even looking away from the instruments in front of him, "Subject's bloodstream estimated to contain eighteen times the Cornerian Medical Department's recommended safe daily dosage of biostimulants."

Fox's eyes widened and he whistled low, "Yikes."

Peppy nodded, "Yeah, to say the least. Luckily her body was in a heightened state of repair from her injuries, so she could take the physical effort needed to handle the dosage. Her mind, however, must've bitten off more than it could chew with that many chemicals roaming her blood system."

The hare shook his head, sighing and stepping back to answer Fox's unasked question, "She'll be alright, but you won't know it when she first comes around. Whenever _that _is."

Fox acknowledged Peppy's explanation with a grim nod, and the room fell silent, each of the occupants either wrapped up in his own thoughts, or comatose.

The vulpine had plenty to mull over. There was a very definite sense of déjà vu about the whole situation, as merely a month before, he had been sitting in the med bay, watching over the comatose lynx who now once again lay before him. However, despite the similar situation, Fox somehow had a very different mindset then he had the first time around. Back then, he was unquestioningly caring and gentle to Miyu; he had, after all, been the sole reason she was in the dire circumstances that she was in. It was only natural, and while some of it was no doubt due to guilt, Fox was, like always, happy to help a fellow being in their moment of need. However, he wasn't feeling especially kind, or compassionate, or really much of anything at all towards the lynx this time around, and it took another minute of contemplation to figure out why.

"_She attacked me," _he thought as he shifted his stare to center on the steady wave of the heart-rate monitor, just about Miyu's cot, _"She knew full well it was me, and she was trying to take me down. Why? What did I do but help?"_

It was obvious from Miyu's actions from hours ago that she didn't want his help. That was fine; his kind advances were rarely appreciated by his comrades in the same line of work as he, and he was used to being snubbed for being on the caring side. But with the lynx, there was something else, something…different. Something that set her apart from every other pilot he had encountered. A protective persuasion had washed over him those first few days after he rescued her a month ago; one that stemmed from knowing he was the direct cause of her suffering.

But there was something about being clouted several times over with a heavy-duty wrench that managed to convince the stubborn vulpine to abandon the guilt trip. Yes, there was something that had attracted him to the idea of caring for her; for being the guy to save her from certain death in the void of space. It was only the natural inclination of his gender to hers; it was a result of instinct, which was a result of evolution. But now, he just couldn't see things that way anymore. Now, she was just someone who was in need, and he had done all he could to help. That's it.

Fox stepped forward and turned towards the door. Stepping around the table the lynx was occupying, he sighed and called back over his shoulder, "Let me know if anything changes."

He had better things to do.

* * *

At least, that's what he thought.

Five hours later found him staring at the ceiling of his room, counting the panels as he tossed a stress ball up into the air, repeatedly catching it as he lay on his bed.

"_There's just something very…not right about this whole thing," _he thought to himself as he caught the ball again, allowing his hand to reflexively toss it back into the air, letting it glide off his fingers as it spun. He had fully come to terms with the fact that based on what had happened earlier that day, the lynx he had rescued a month ago didn't want his help. And he was okay with that sentiment. He didn't want to be the sap who kept insisting on wasting his own resources to aid someone who probably still wanted to plant a wrench through his teeth.

"_But then why can't I let it go?" _There was something about the whole scenario that he kept coming back to; something that had plucked a nerve down deep that refused to stop vibrating.

He ran a hand through the stubble of white fur that rose a bit above the rest of the pelt on his head, acting as a layer of hair. The ball shot up, reached the zenith of its arc where the artificial gravity of the _Great Fox_ brought it to a halt, and tumbled back down into his waiting other hand. It shot up again, and again, and again, with very little variation, each time making a quiet _thud _as it landed.

Fox knew himself. He knew that the reason for his hesitation and anxiety lay buried beneath a mound of mental deliberation, just waiting for the time to be put in to uncover it, like always. But this time, he was fortunate. This time, a heavy lump in his gut told him he already knew the reason he wasn't able to drop Miyu off at the nearest hospital barge and continue on with his life. And it wasn't exactly what he had initially feared.

He just wanted to help. Too many times, he had seen situations where a little extra selflessness could've gone a long way, while he stood by and did nothing. Maybe it was helping someone support a burden, physical or emotional. Or maybe it was letting someone know that they weren't alone in the universe; that somebody, even a complete stranger, cared.

He caught the ball and held it, squeezing it until the soft material molded around his fingers.

Maybe, it was saving someone from themselves.

* * *

"_And in military news, recent deployments of assets of the Fifth and Seventh Cornerian Naval Fleets have been made in escalating activity against Venomian Warlords Ypson and Bauker, respectively. Military personnel report that in the interest of secrecy and the protection of our service men and women, no further information can be disclosed at this moment…"_

"Well _that_ was informative." _Click._

"_Today on Bassler, we discuss the ramifications of not investing properly for retirement…"_

"Or, how to be a money-grubbing prick and take it all with you to the grave." _Click._

"_But how could you love him? He's your brother for the love of Sol…"_

"Oh hey, check it out Peppy; your soaps."

"Keep going, Falco."

"Right-o." _Click._

"_Another rash of a strange new sickness has swept downtown Corneria City, resulting in the deaths of three more citizens. Doctors report no prior knowledge or encounters with this new disease before the initial wave a week ago, which they have dubbed 'Neon', for the brightly colored…"_

"Ugh. You'd think Katinian 'free sample week' broadcasts would be, ya know, interesting enough to try to get people to sign up for the service. But whatever; their loss." _Click._

A trio of mercenaries occupied the rec room of the _Great Fox_, all lounging in different ways. Falco had taken advantage of the fact that the _Great Fox's _flight path and Katina's orbit around Lylat's star happened to match up, granting them temporary access to the planet's landside telecom broadcasts, and was sprawled out on a sofa he had pulled up in front of the wall-mounted data screen. One arm was bent up over his head and hung off the back side of the couch, while the other clutched a remote control for the screen. He used it often.

Peppy, on the other hand, had intentionally turned his favorite chair around to face the opposite direction from the viewscreen, and instead chose to occupy his time with a book. A steaming mug of some sort of herbal tea was throwing up wisps of vapor at his side as he turned another page, reaching for the cup while keeping his eyes on the tome. He glanced up briefly at Slippy to make sure he hadn't moved. He hadn't.

Slippy sat on another chair in the room. He could've been sitting _in _the chair, enjoying the chance to rest and relax before their big mission, but instead he simply _occupied _it, sitting on the edge and staring blankly at the floor. His breathing was as even and rhythmic as his blinking.

"…_we'll show you how to take your average road vehicle and convert it into an all terrain, wildlife stomping, tree crushing beast of an auto! Stay tuned for a step by step…"_

"Yo Slippy, your favorite; backwater hicks and mechanics customization," Falco quipped, receiving only silence in return. The toad didn't even look up. "Slippy?" the avian questioned, finally pushing himself off the couch and glancing back at the room. He saw their mechanic's blank stare and listless posture and cocked his head to the side. "Hey Peppy; what's up with Slip? It looks like he's just seen a ghost…for like, the last five hours straight."

"He's still recovering from the concussion Miyu gave him, remember?" Peppy glanced back over his chair and sighed when he saw that Falco still maintained his quizzical gaze, despite his explanation. "No, I don't suppose you do, ironically enough."

"Oh," Falco declared as he got up and stretched, elongating the syllable as his muscles strained, "No no, I remembered, I just, ya know, forgot we have a name for her now."

Peppy rolled his eyes, regarding the taller mercenary as he sprawled out on another couch, this one facing the hare so the two could talk face to face. Falco relaxed and sank into the cushions, placing his hands behind his head and taking on an indifferent tone. "So, is he gonna snap out of it anytime soon? We sort of need him for the sortie coming up."

"As best as I can tell…no. He's not," he replied. Peppy placed a length of wire on top of the page he was on and shut the book, setting it down on the table next to him. He exhaled slowly, leaning forward and rubbing his temples before folding his hands between his knees. It was clear, even to the avian who was normally aloof in these matters, that the hare had something on his mind.

"So…what are we going to do then?" Falco asked, "We promised Bill a flight of fighters to back up the _Great Fox_; two isn't a flight." Then, after a moment's pause, he added, "Hell, _three_ technicallyisn't a flight, even if you decided to cancel your retirement and take Slippy's place."

"What about Miyu?" Peppy abruptly proposed, surprising Falco and causing him to sit up and face the hare in a similar posture.

"What about her?"

"Suppose we let her fill in for Slippy, just for this one mission."

"…Maybe it's good you retired Gramps, cause clearly you've lost it."

"I'm serious, Falco," Peppy replied, with an equally grave expression to match, "It makes sense if you think about it. She's a competent pilot, if what you and Fox told me of your first encounter with her is correct. She's probably got a good deal of flight experience behind her…why not?"

"Well, let's see," Falco began, pretending to stop and consider his argument before letting it spill forth like a torrent, "One, she's just woken up from her second _coma _in a month, so she's not gonna be firing on all cylinders upstairs, if you know what I mean. Two, she's still frickin' bed-ridden as far as we know, and we'll be at the rendezvous point by tomorrow. And, oh yeah, she's still got this little tick in her head that makes her want to _kill _us. Or Fox. I can't tell."

Falco shook his head and grinned, confident he had made his point, "And besides, if we can get her to fly with us, which I very much doubt, we'll still only have two pilots because _I _won't fly anywhere within a sector of her when she's in space with an Arwing."

"Alright, Falco," Peppy said, raising a hand with the palm facing the avian, as if warding him off, "I get it. It was only a suggestion; that's it."

* * *

The med bay was quiet. Even the constant beeping of the instruments hooked up to the lynx's vital signs had been muted, the only indications that they were still active being the green glows emanating from their status screens. A remote monitoring rig had been set up for the team's convenience, freeing them up to go about their normal routine without being burdened by keeping a direct watch on the lynx. If she started to crash for whatever reason, the team would be alerted via the _Great Fox_'s internal com system.

Fox sat on the same table Slippy had occupied earlier that day, though now it was as empty as most of the rest of the room. His feet hung off the ground by a foot or so, and his back was bent forward so that he slouched down a little, folding his arms between his knees. He was staring at the lynx.

She was lying prone on her back, her torso and lower body covered by a light, sky blue blanket. Her arms were exposed up to the shoulder, her short sleeves rolled up, in order to allow an IV and various instruments to be hooked up to her limbs. Most of her left one had been encased in a flexible, thin sling to provide support for her recently reset shoulder. Her head was tilted to the side toward him, and her breathing came in a shallow, steady rhythm. It was a far cry from the twisted visage of emotion and pain she had showcased earlier. Now she looked peaceful.

"_Well, almost_," Fox thought, adding the qualifier as he noticed that it appeared as if her eyes were moving rapidly under closed lids, the tiny bumps caused by her covered pupils darting back and forth. "_She must be dreaming."_

He let his mind wander, his vision blurring out as he leaned back, bracing himself by placing his arms behind him on the counter. The thought that he should have seen the lynx's anger coming from a mile away stuck out most in his psyche, like a shining beacon of his subconscious shouting 'I told you so.' The signs littered every conscious meeting the two had.

When their eyes first made contact in the same med bay they now occupied, only a month earlier, he should have seen that what he had mistaken for an initial look of vulnerability was instead fear. The looks of pain and suffering were probably glares of hatred against who she must've seen as her captor. And who knows, that hand that had stretched out toward him as the hospital personnel were moving her to the ambulance from the _Great Fox _back on Corneria could've been seeking his throat, not a comforting paw in return. He couldn't believe he misinterpreted everything.

What he still couldn't understand though, was _why _all this hatred was being expressed towards his crew, and him in particular. Hadn't he saved her from literally certain death? Hadn't he and his mates cared for her and spent who knows how much in medical supplies for her? Hadn't they dropped her off at a Cornerian hospital, guaranteeing her continued safety as she made a near-full recovery? They'd jumped through hoops to save her, and all they got in return was a revenge trip that had been cut short by a blast from Fox's handgun.

His vision refocused on the lynx, noticing that she hadn't even moved, not that he expected her to. Her breathing was exactly the same, her heart rate monitor pulse hadn't changed at all, her eyes stared at him with startling intensity…

"Boo."

Fox yipped and fell backwards onto the counter, catching himself by bracing with his elbows as his knees came up, as if to ward off an attacker. As he caught his breath and right himself though, he immediately regretted allowing himself to be surprised like that. She was laughing.

"Pahaha," she panted, quietly but surprisingly without hindrance, "Careful now; I might jump off this table and finish the job."

Fox smiled and caught the joke, or at least he thought he did. She was strapped down by her waist and limbs, ensuring any movement during her period of unconsciousness wouldn't damage an IV placing or strain her injured arm. He also smiled at the sound of her voice; it was something he had never truly heard before, and for such a small detail, it didn't disappoint him. To be able to finally add voice and a normal expression to his running memory of her made her more of a 'person' to be remembered, rather than just a 'thing'.

But as soon as he grinned, she stopped laughing and slowly returned to the hostile grimace he had assumed she would have all along. She obviously wasn't kidding around with her threat.

A decidedly awkward silence filled the room as Fox's own smile faded, and he came to the realization that her second coma hadn't changed anything about her attitude towards him. Her eyes were solid and without emotion, and her lips were pressed loosely together, as if daring Fox to keep speaking. If there had been a knife in her hand, he had no doubt she would've attempted to throw it at him, restricted as she was.

"Why are you keeping me here, Mr. Fox," she asked, breaking the silence and speaking with a smooth, even voice. She glanced away from him for a brief second, as if looking around the room for someone else.

"…Why not?" he answered, scratching the back of his head and cocking his head to the side, "You're injured, this is a med bay. If you want to move to the rec room I'd be more than happy to wheel you in, just don't talk to Falco when his soaps are-."

"I mean on your ship, McCloud," she responded, her deadpan expression and delivery halting any idea that she thought something was funny, "Why is this the second time I've woken up here?"

"I think that's been your choice, Miyu," he replied, adding a slight pause between the end of his sentence and the uttering of her name, "Why did you come back?"

He finally got a visual response from the lynx, but it wasn't exactly the one the vulpine was hoping for. At the sound of her name, her eyes widened briefly and, according to the readout on her monitor, her heartbeat spiked. She opened her mouth to ask something, but Fox stopped her short as he produced the ID card from his pocket, turning it around and glancing down at it.

Her eyes narrowed and her fists clenched as she added another layer of latent antagonism to her voice, "Oh, so you went pawing through my stuff then? That was a poor choice, Mr. Fox."

Fox ignored her, flipping it over and spotting a dark red blotch on the reverse, nearly black. It had dried to a crust, so his rubbing produced tiny flakes that peeled off and fell to the floor. He made the connection immediately, and suddenly he found himself mirroring back some of the anger that was being directed at him.

"Huh," he said, continuing to focus all of his attention on the card, "There seems to be some of my friend's blood stained on here; you should think of getting a new one."

Fox slid off the counter and approached the lynx, grabbing a stool and swinging it around to sit in front of him. He sat on it backwards, resting his arms on the backrest and staring off to the side for a second, considering his words. As he expected, she didn't respond at all to his new, decidedly unsympathetic behavior. If anything, a small, almost imperceptible smile tugged at her lips, as if she was amused by his show of silent emotion.

"Now, let's get _one _thing straight," he began, bringing his eyes to center back on the lynx, "I was keeping you here because I felt sorry for you; because I thought you could use a rest from whatever it seemed to be that was going wrong enough in your life that you took up security work for smugglers. But it's obvious you don't need or want it, so now, the only reason I'm keeping you here is because I'm not about to hurl someone out the airlock-"

"But you would take my life and do the same," she interrupted, her voice confident and firm, "You would destroy my life's only investment and source of money, you would destroy my chances at the pursuit of happiness, you would destroy-"

"If it means protecting myself and my friends then, yeah, I would," he continued, even as she kept talking, "And I would do again if I had to. I know you would do the same if our situations were reversed-"

"If our situations were reversed you wouldn't be alive right now," she answered, not breaking a beat.

"Well I guess that's the difference between you and me, isn't it?"

"Listen merc , you stole my life; you killed me all but physically, and all I want is-"

"Why did you come back? What could you have possibly hoped to gain by sneaking aboard _my _ship and-"

"Oh shut it, both of you."

Both Fox and Miyu stopped and the room fell silent, save for boot steps on the metal deck plating. Peppy rounded the counter where the lynx still lay and crossed his arms, staring at both of them in turn as they glared at each other. Miyu finally broke the stare though, rolling her eyes and looking up at the ceiling.

"Not you again," she muttered.

"Not you _again?_" Fox exclaimed, continuing his glare at her before switching over to Peppy, "You knew she was awake and didn't tell me?"

"Could you blame me?" Peppy retorted, unfolding his arms and grabbing a replacement IV container, unhooking the old one from the lynx's support system as he did so, "I knew you would come down here and antagonize her, even if you didn't mean to." Fox didn't say anything, though he continued to stare at the hare as the latter gently attached the fresh container of fluid to the receptacle-equipped stand.

With a final twist and a tender squeeze, the clear solution began to filter down through the IV tubes, briefly stopped where the thin hose met the hollow needle attached to the lynx's arm before clearing it and entering Miyu's bloodstream. Satisfied, Peppy snatched up the old, empty container and tossed it into the garbage chute. He turned back towards the two other occupants of the room, and reassumed his stern stance from moments before. They both stared back, waiting for what the hare had to say.

"Look, as much as I know this isn't going to go over well with either of you…I have a request," he said, planting his eyes squarely on the lynx's, "Miyu, we need you to fly for us."

"P-pahaha," she laughed, almost spitting with the first syllable. Every ounce of mirth was intended; it was such a ridiculous notion, flying for the very people that destroyed her livelihood and, for all intents and purposes, were holding her captive. Looking back at Peppy though, she saw he was serious, much to her surprise. She took on an authentically questioning expression, "Aha, ha…oh. You're serious, aren't you? What are you, senile?"

"Oh, deary, don't even go down that road with me," he responded with a genuinely amused smile, "I've heard it all. And yes, I am _absolutely_ serious."

Fox jumped to his feet as he pushed away the stool he had borrowed and turned towards the hare. "Peppy, you can't be," he said, spreading his arms out in a sweeping motion and shaking his head, "There are just…so, _so _many things wrong with that idea. I honestly don't even know where to begin."

Peppy rocked back on his heels, looking up at the ceiling for a second before glancing at the young vulpine. He had expected such resistance, and knew from years of dealing with all of the juvenile personalities on the team that as much as he hated to think of it in that way, stern parenting was the only way around it. "Pick your favorite."

"Well, she just tried to _kill _me, for one," he exclaimed, taking on a look of curiosity, as if he couldn't believe Peppy hadn't seen the whole incident from before, "She's clearly got some sort of vendetta against us, against _me_-"

"Oh, like you don't know why," she interrupted, still itching to argue despite being strapped down the table, "You shoot at me until my ship's nothing but dust and then act like I'm the bad guy-"

"You take a friggin' _wrench _to the back of my friend's head and then try to _kill_ me with it; what am I missing here?"

Peppy sighed as the two teenagers before him again fell into a fruitless quarrel, neither of them able to make a point because the other would interrupt with one of their own. He waited a few moments, just in case one of them wanted to be the more civilized and take it upon themselves to stop the back and forth argument. He couldn't say he was surprised though when neither seemed up to the task. Shaking his head in disappointment, he took it upon himself.

Reaching up to the slightly taller vulpine, he pressed his thumb and forefinger together, placed them just before where the fox's recently sown stitches were, and flicked them, hard. Fox's eyes went wide and he stopped bickering long enough to yelp in pain, covering the wound on his cheek and glancing hard at Peppy. He was quiet though.

Meanwhile, the hare knew the lynx wouldn't respond to a verbal command, and he didn't particularly relish the idea of striking her, so he instead grabbed her IV bag and squeezed it firmly. The rush of fluid into Miyu's veins drew the blood vessels immediately around the IV needle taut, doing minimal damage to her circulatory system but causing a debilitating burst of pain. She mirrored Fox's yelp and fell silent, glaring at the hare with hatred and growling between her clenched teeth.

"Jeez, the hell was that for?" she asked, unable to move but flexing her arms as much as she could as the internal pressure slowly faded, "Crazy old bastard…"

"To be honest Miss Miyu, it's not a request; it's a heads-up," Peppy said with a smile, leaning in closer to make sure there was no missing the threat underlying his voice, "Trust me, I'm not any more excited about this than you, both of you. But in the contract that we signed with the Cornerian Military, we put up the _Great Fox _and a flight of three fighters for the mission. If we don't show up with exactly our bargained equipment, in the event something goes wrong, we're the first ones to get the blame as an outside party."

"And if we get the blame, we don't get paid," Fox finished for the hare, still staring at the lynx but no longer in a threatening way. Peppy was still truly speaking to both of them though; Fox was just as stubborn about the entire situation as Miyu. He merely finished the sentence to prove to Peppy that he understood.

"That's right," the elder confirmed, nodding and leaning back to his normal posture, "As much as I like the military, the Cornerians are just as stringent with their cash as smugglers and thugs. And this paycheck is the only safety net we have before bankruptcy, so I'll be damned if I let an interloper be the downfall of our last shot at staying afloat." Peppy fell silent after his last statement; having said his piece, he was happy to stand back and let the two minds before him work it out in their heads.

Fox sighed and leaned back onto the counter opposite of the lynx's, crossing his arms and staring down at the ground. No matter how many times he tried to push Peppy's idea through his head, it kept getting denied by his refusal to fly with the girl who had so recently made an attempt at his life. In fighter combat, there was a certain amount of trust that was necessary in order for a pilot to act in concert with his wingmen. It was the very reason Falco and himself worked so well together. And there was just something about depending on someone who went through an incredible amount of trouble just track him down and exact some imagined revenge that put him off.

Miyu's thought path let to essentially the same conclusion. From the moment the hare had brought up the idea of her flying for McCloud and his team, she knew she didn't have much of a choice in her given predicament. Ignoring – which was a stretch – the fact that she was strapped down to a cot with medicinal drugs being pumped through her bloodstream, she still didn't have anyway to get off the ship she was being held on.

Her own fighter was beyond any hope of repair; she had seen it in pieces when she had impersonated the inspector before they left Corneria. She had no familiarity with how to operate a ship the size of the _Great Fox_, and she wasn't about to break free and try, not with who-knows-how-many guards the team may have. And there was almost certainly some form of remote security in place on board the team's own starfighters. Short of finding an escape pod and willing to be drifting helplessly in space, she was at the mercy of McCloud and his team. She hated him even more for that.

But, despite all of the logical reasoning, Miyu still couldn't bring herself to even think about _helping _the vulpine and his friends. After all they had done to her, why should she lift a finger for their favor? _"Let them suffer," _she thought casually, shrugging.

Fox and Miyu's eyes met and they stared at each other. And they continued to stare. And stare. Neither wanted to give ground and be the first to turn away, and at the same time, both were almost completely lost in thought. The room continued to bask in silence, the _thrum _of the _Great Fox_'s cruise drives creating a white noise backdrop. One of them had to break eventually. Peppy began to whistle softly, a tune that started slow and gentle but gradually picked up in tempo, reflecting his growing desire for one of the other two occupants of the room to speak up.

Then, at the same time, their eyelids snapped shut and opened again, bringing moisture to the sapphire and emerald eyes, respectively.

"What would my cut be?"

"How do we make sure she'll come back?"

They had both turned to look at Peppy for answers to their questions, but they immediately re-established their glare when they realized they had broke at the same time. The breach in silence was followed by deep chuckling from the older hare.

"Well, ladies first," Peppy said, turning to Miyu who returned his smile with a scowl of her own, expressing her dislike of the phrase he used, "If we complete the contact, you'll get an even cut, just like all of us. No more, no less."

"Which would be?"

"Twenty thousand credits, give or take," Peppy replied, raising a hand and rotating it rapidly up and down in a gesture of an educated guess. Then, turning to Fox, "And we have our ways to keep track of her, don't worry about that. I've got Slippy working a short little program to help us out."

Miyu became silent again, a pattern that tipped Peppy off to a very tactical mind hiding beneath her appearance of being rash and violent. Her thoughts followed roughly the same train as they did just minutes before, and they, unsurprisingly, arrived at the same mental station. Refusing the mission meant it was most likely she would get dropped off and left for dead at the next spaceport, if they even made it that far without her help. Accepting it meant a reason to keep her around, and a substantial paycheck to boot. And as much as she hated to consider herself subject to it, she couldn't deny the ironic satisfaction that her captors had made it blatantly obvious that they needed her help.

"How do I know you won't just blast me out of the stars when we're done with whatever sortie you sellships were contracted for?" she asked, voicing her sole concern about the proposition.

"You don't, dear," Peppy replied, smiling and again assuming a grandfatherly tone, "Other than the absurd idea that a mercenary troupe, strapped for cash, would sacrifice a very valuable starfighter for no valid reason."

"That doesn't exactly do it for me, Gramps," she said, deadpan in voice and expression.

Peppy glanced at Fox out of the corner of his eye, and grunted when he saw the vulpine stifling a laugh. 'Gramps' had been long considered something of the Star Fox team's nickname for Peppy, and while he had gotten used to it from his own teammates, the elder wasn't sure he wanted to let the lynx get away with what she had stumbled across. Instead of verbally rebuking her though, he merely crossed his arms again and sighed.

"Noted," he stated, simple and unemotionally, "Now, what'll be?"

* * *

Author Comments: I'm going to be completely honest: I never thought I'd make it ten chapters in when I started this story. But looking back, I'm really glad I did. Writing this little adventure has been akin to something therapeutic, and seeing you guys enjoy it so much really means a lot. Thank you everyone, both the readers and the reviewers; both the admirers and critics. Heck, especially the critics.

Many thanks to Feuerstoss for your review; I'm really glad to hear you're enjoying the story.

As always, danke to those who read this chapter. And while you're down here, why not click that review button and let me know what you think? Or don't. Either way, the thanks are already out there. They're like bullets in that sense; you can't unshoot them. Although unlike bullets, I'd hope one would be inclined to be on the receiving end of thanks.

...yeah. Thanks guys!


	11. Chapter 11: Mist

**XI****: **_Mist_

"Permission to pursue the retreating enemy frigates out of the warzone."

Sector Z was alight in a maelstrom of illumination and combustion as warships of the Cornerian Seventh Fleet and Warlord Bauker's own private armada traded blows of incredible magnitude. The vessels drifted in and out of position in an effort to gain the upper hand tactically, erasing all but the most vague of battle lines. Set within the strange backdrop of Sector Z, the yellow-tinted glow caused by the light of Sol reflecting off the gas particles surrounding the fight lent an uncanny, almost sundrenched look to the whole ordeal. It almost looked like an ancient, time-worn photograph that had turned a sickly tan from unprotected aging.

At least, that's the analogy Captain Hartford made in his head as he stared out of the massive bridge viewport.

His bridge was surprisingly calm given the current situation. From the raised platform he stood on, the husky could look down on the semi-circular bank of deck officers as they performed their assigned roles with admirable calm and efficiency. Of particular notice were the gunnery crew, the chief officer of the team calling shots and concentrating fire with an extreme degree of precision. His commands to fire were almost immediately followed by the booming vibrations of the _Broadsword_'s massive battery of weapons unloading their payload at an unlucky target. The cruiser was particularly well armed for a ship of its class, and Hartford made sure his crew used every ounce of offensive power.

He reflected on the fact that they had taken very little damage since his portion of the Seventh Fleet ran into one of Bauker's combat patrols, which had immediately called in backup. It was probably this that he most attributed his crew's calmness to. Losses on both sides had been minimal in fact, but all it took was a single death of a heavy hitting cruiser or destroyer to turn the tide of the immense battle.

The words "C.N.S. _Hauberk" _appeared in the bottom left corner of the bridge viewport and were lit up a fluorescent green font, indicating speech. It was very impractical to have a portrait system like the communications equipment the snubfighters used, so a simpler, name-based identification system was used. Localized microphones and directional speakers on both sides kept the transmission private between the two commanders of the communicating ships.

"Permission granted, Hartford," Commander Bishop replied, strong in Hartford's own ears but near silent to everyone else on the bridge. "Leave your escorts behind but take the frigate _Hammerhead_ with you. I'll transmit the orders."

"Roger that, sir," Hartford answered.

Smaller, one-man fighters darted to and fro between the massive capital ships, creating an intricate dance of death while the larger vessels exchanged laser and projectile blasts multiple times larger than the tiny snubfighters. A glancing blow from an enemy destroyer's battery flashed across the bridge viewport, stunning the Captain for a moment before he regained his footing and began giving out commands.

"Helm, full speed for the pair of frigates retreating from their battle line. We're going to break through and pursue them out," he barked at the navigator, seated in the crux of the crew pit beneath the husky. He continued with the weapon's captain, "Weapons, hold your fire and charge until we're in range of our targets, I want our first salvo to pack as much punch as possible. Sensors, get me the read out on those frigates."

Hartford gripped the railing as the _Broadsword _lurched forward, immense engines pulsing and boosting it to a heightened speed as it rushed across the proverbial battlefield. On the two dimensional radar grid, holographically projected onto the viewport, the young captain could see a friendly frigate breaking formation and taking up a tailing position behind them. The _Hammerhead _was a lighter weight class than the _Broadsword_, and it would depend on Hartford's vessel to break through the rough enemy line they were fast approaching. Commander Bishop's voice again poured through the speakers, though this time on a fleet-wide channel.

"All vessels, concentrate fire on the enemy cruisers flanking the retreating frigates. Give the _Broadsword _and _Hammerhead _some covering fire!"

Hartford's lips curled into the faintest of smiles as the pair of enemy cruisers blocking the way to the escaping frigates were suddenly lit up with friendly ordinance. For the enemy's part, they tried to ignore the immense firestorm and focus their own attacks on the _Broadsword, _but it was all but hopeless. The cruiser on the left began to vent air and fire into space just as the _Broadsword _soared by with the _Hammerhead _in close pursuit. A rippling explosion rocked Hartford's vessel as the enemy ship detonated, sending debris and massive pieces of shrapnel flying in every direction.

The Captain had noticed the peculiar side-effects of fighting in a gas cloud as dense as Sector Z, and one of the most startling was the presence of sound. Space was normally a comfortably silent void, one in which the massive explosion that represented the death of the enemy cruiser would've passed on without the faintest whisper. But with the tightly packed gas molecules omnipresent around them, the sound had something to vibrate off of; meaning detonation was accompanied by an eerie, almost hollow sounding _boom_.

A pair of wireframe frigate readouts appeared on the top right corner of the bridge viewport, shaking him from his mental hiatus. He said the names that appeared beneath the wireframes quietly to himself as he read them, noting that digitally projected lines connected the wireframes to their real-world counterparts, which were fairly distant engine glows at this point.

"The _Grenadier _and the _Cipher_," he whispered, watching with a sense of satisfaction that the numbers on the viewport representing their distance from the _Broadsword_ were falling rapidly.

The young husky had a hunch about the pair of frigates; something in his gut that told him that they were worth following. The fight between the two sides had been raging for no more than ten minutes before they got spooked by something and started running. And when the fight is that evenly matched, nobody ran, because the loss of a single vessel on either side could tip the scales in the other side's favor. Commander Bishop must've sensed something wrong too, because he had cleared Hartford's request without hesitation.

"What are you guys hiding?" he asked nobody as the words 'C.N.S. _Hammerhead_' appeared on the viewport.

"Captain Hartford, this is Captain Vera of the _Hammerhead_," the com unit said, "Permission to take point."

"Granted, Captain Vera," Hartford replied, watching on the grid as the friendly frigate moved with surprising speed from behind the _Broadsword _to the front, just off to the right side. The husky could visibly see the _Hammerhead _now as it occupied the rightmost portion of the viewport.

The sleek frigate, while smaller than Hartford's cruiser, was still a deadly sight to behold. The powerful engine block in the back quickly narrowed to a thinner, streamlined spar that widened in the middle before narrowing again towards the front. The entire spar bristled with smaller-scale laser turrets, primarily designed for fending off enemy fighters and bombers. Defying standard capital ship configurations, the bridge was placed in the middle of the vessel instead of the front or rear, though given the frigate's unique mission profile, it could be understood why.

Capping off the frigate in front was what appeared to be a massive plow, jutting forward into a vertical point with the sides sloping backwards at a ninety degree angle. The plow occupied roughly the same silhouette as the oversized engine block in back. Hartford knew from briefings that the aptly named _Hammerhead _was formerly a Venomian ship that had been captured and repurposed for Cornerian use, and its brutally efficient design showed. The entire ship was constructed with a single purpose; chasing down enemy vessels and literally ramming them with its ultra-reinforced, nearly impervious plow.

"Sir," the weapon's officer called up to the bridge, "The frigate _Grenadier _is nearing the edge of combat range."

* * *

By contrast, the sky blue gases of Sector X swirled and floated with a calm grace.

A full squadron of starfighters and a quartet of medium freighters hung motionless on the very edge of the sector's main gas cloud, safe within a perimeter of unmanned defensive turrets, left there by the Cornerian Military as a waypoint. The fighters were grouped into three diagonal squares of four while the transports drifted in a single line formation. The communications channels were completely silent.

A thin wisp of the azure vapor slowly curled its way around the wing of one of the outermost CDF Fighters, wrapping around the metal and steel like a snake around prey. The stream of gas particles was impeded briefly by the barrel of a laser cannon, strapped underneath the wing, but like a river, it split and flowed around weapon and rejoined on the opposite side. It worked its way up the arm of the ship towards cockpit, briefly pooling at the joint of the wing to the fuselage before extending upwards. It crawled across the green trim of the fighter, seeping into the tiny access panels on the exterior of the hull, pouring into the almost imperceptible cracks.

Finally, the strand of sapphire gases hit the cockpit, flowing up the durable transparent material like a gravity defying stream. It flooded across the top of the angular viewport and down the other side, mirroring its original journey before flowing off the opposite wing tip and continuing on to the next fighter in the formation.

Flight Sergeant Rhena Haggerty watched the entire event with bored indifference, bracing her chin on her palm and her forehead on the side of her cockpit, staring out into view encompassing gas cloud. Her dark-furred fingers drummed an improvised fill on the panels of the dashboard, the only source of sound in her entire fighter. She sighed, trying fruitlessly to pick out the individual particles in the stream gas running up one side of the cockpit and down the other. It was all she could do to keep her mind off of the mind-numbing boredom she felt.

"_Ya know, I never thought a _book_ would be something I'd need to remember to bring on a mission," _she thought, rolling her eyes, _"Or at the very least one of those handheld videogames."_

The mercenaries the squadron had hired were late, although it couldn't truly be blamed on them. At the last moment, it had been discovered that the Blue Arrow freighters had been overfilled with fuel. But, instead of telling the Lieutenant, or anyone else, the freighter captains had decided to keep it to themselves and merely use the extra fuel to overcharge their cruise engines, causing them to arrive at the designated rendezvous point a few hours early.

Now, the rush to get to the danger zone and get the job over with had faded into a dull, nerve-racking wait for the mercenaries to show up.

"_I wonder how the LT's doing with that freighter captain," _she pondered, again resorting to keeping herself company.

For the last fifteen minutes, Lieutenant Calloway and the lead freighter captain had been arguing about whether or not to simply go on ahead without the mercenaries. The Lieutenant argued -- logically, in Rhena's mind -- that it would be suicide on an already suicidal mission to move on without the added security afforded by the mercenary troupe's 'big guns'. The freighter captain, on the other hand, refused to hear any of it, insisting that there was more money to be made by pressing their unexpected time advantage and arriving early at Yohan Depot.

Rhena sighed again. The damn civilians never took the time to take a step back and take in the larger picture; all they ever saw was money, and how to squeeze every last credit out of a trade run. It was hard for her to understand how one was to respect and protect someone who was so greedy as to forfeit added security on a shipping lane that was proven to be deadly. In any other circumstance, she had no compunction about letting natural selection take its course and weed out those who didn't have any consideration for tactical thought. She just didn't understand why her fellow squad mates and herself had to follow someone who obviously didn't think things out too far ahead.

She reached over and snatched her braid off her shoulder with her mouth, grinding it between her teeth as she rested her chin on her palm again, staring out the cockpit. The grinding downgraded to casual gnawing, and she gradually felt herself relaxing, if only a little bit. It was the sole nervous habit she allowed herself, and for some reason or another it brought her comfort. Maybe it was the unconscious, repetitive motion, or the salty taste of the hair dye as tiny bits of the fiery-colored material seeped out onto her taste buds. _Something _about it just…

The comm. unit crackled, startling the Flight Sergeant as the audio transmission played. It was the Lieutenant.

"Alright, back in formation Gamma Squadron," he said, sounding weary and tired out. It didn't take a psychiatrist to realize it was from losing the argument with the freighter captain. "We're going to make a run for Yohan without our backup. Grey, leave a message pod with our flight plan for the mercenaries in case they arrive in time to meet us halfway."

"Roger, sir," a second voice, one that Rhena quickly recognized as Bill's, responded. A few seconds later though, his voice again poured through the squadron-wide channel, this time with a hint of confusion, "Ah, sir? Someone back at Castle must've forgotten to load a pod onto my fighter. I don't have one."

It was an innocent mistake. Every fighter pilot knew that the ground crews that took care of their ships were prone to a slip-up every so often, just like the pilots themselves. It still didn't make them any less annoying when they popped up every now and again though.

Lieutenant Calloway sighed as he replied, "Fine. Haggerty, you do it then. Grey, give her the encryption key. Let's be quick about it and get underway. Everyone else, switch to general communications and fall in. Calloway out."

"Understood, sir," Rhena responded, realizing with a sheepish grin she was still chewing on her braid and causing her words to come out muffled and slightly slurred. She tapped the key on her communications console that allowed general transmissions to automatically clear, forgoing the extra step of doing so in the heat of battle. No sooner had she done this then Bill's portrait appeared on her HUD.

"Something told me this was going to happen," he muttered as he was donning his helmet, strapping the chin strap under his muzzle. He stopped midway though as he got a look at Rhena, cocking his head to the side and unable to stop a smile from spreading across his face, letting the strap fall.

She looked at him quizzically at first, wondering what he was staring at, until she realized with alarm what it was. Spitting the braid out of her mouth, she coughed and glared daggers at the hound, who was trying to hold back childish fits of laughter. Her glower failed to deter him though, and he couldn't resist himself. His grin threatened to break into gales of laughter at any moment, and though she knew he wasn't being mean spirited about it, she still hated him briefly for it.

"So…yeah," he stammered, trying unsuccessfully to hold in every chuckle, "I'm transmitting the encryption code now. The uh, the LT doesn't want any distress broadcast on the message pod; the mercenaries will know to scan for it when they get here and don't see us. We don't want it to fall into any stray patrols by whoever's been ambushing our wingmates recently."

"Roger that, _Grey,_" she replied, making sure he heard the disapproval of his reaction to her odd habit when she spoke the last syllable. He just smiled, nodding and cutting the transmission as he grabbed for his chinstrap again, leaving Rhena to her thoughts.

She growled to herself as she reached down and snatched her own helmet from the foot well, disappointed that she had showed Bill the nervous habit. A sign of weakness. How the timing had worked out so against her favor that her superior had just seen the one chink in the armor she had kept hidden for so long, she didn't know, but the young wolf couldn't help but feel wronged somehow. Running a paw through her hair, pushing it down in preparation for donning the helmet, she reflected back on that last thought for a moment. She paused, staring down at the high-grade plastic headpiece in her hands before smirking and reluctantly pulling her head from side to side, as if admitting something to herself that she was reluctant to do.

"_I guess it would've been worse if it were anyone else," _she confessed to herself, sliding the helmet in place and strapping the chin guard across with a _snap_. It had been a long time coming, but she was finally starting to see Bill as more than just a superior officer.

Her hot-headed personality and quick attitude had made friends scarce in the squadron, and as much as she hated to admit it to herself, it was her own fault. The other cadets had simply stopped asking her to join them on shore leave after having had enough of her terse replies. Those that stuck around were eventually pushed away, almost as if she were afraid to actually succeed at making and keeping acquaintances amongst her fellow pilots. She was a very competent sergeant, and a remarkable fighter pilot, but her interaction with the rest of Gamma Squadron ended as soon as she doffed her uniform or jumpsuit.

Bill…was different, however. He refused to run when the others had given up on Rhena, instead sticking it out and making sure she was included in the inevitable mandatory social events. Despite the initially snappish glares she shot him (before he was a _First _Flight Sergeant, of course), he would always be the only one to sit with her at the non-com's mess hall back on Castle Base. She couldn't remember how many times he had reminded her to use less formal language when they were talking; he would ask how the weather was, and she would reply with a firm 'fine, sir'. His advances were never anything more or less than friendly, and he had gradually worn her down to the point where she could finally, if reluctantly, say she had a friend.

He was still a superior though, and she couldn't shake the 'sir' after most of the sentences she said to him. It was just something she had to work on.

She reached over and entered in the encryption code that had popped up on her HUD after Bill sent it, setting the message pod's security system. As soon as she had done that, a quick but muffled whirring from beneath her signaled the message pod's priming. A prompt appeared on her HUD and she followed it, clearing her voice and activating the recording software.

"Star Fox mercenaries, this is Flight Sergeant Haggerty, Gamma Squadron, 54th Cornerian Tactical Fight Wing. Due to circumstances beyond our control, we've arrived at the rendezvous point early, and the captain of the Blue Arrow freighters has insisted we leave early as well. Contained on this message pod is the flight plan for my squadron. If you retrieve this pod…"

* * *

"…within a halfhour of the initial time stamp, there should still be time to catch up and join us for the rest of the flight. Due to these unforeseen circumstances, you will not be docked payment if this occurs. If, however, you don't catch up in time or find this pod too late, the Cornerian Government will cancel our contract and reimburse you for the fuel used to travel this far. Haggerty, out."

"…Well _shit_," Falco muttered as Fox tapped the _stop _button on the message pod, sitting on the rec room tabletop. "The hell do we do now?"

"Fox, what was the timestamp on that pod?" Peppy asked.

"Erm, I…never actually checked," the vulpine replied sheepishly, reaching forward and accessing the information of the torso-sized cylindrical object. A holograph projection of several numbers shot up into the air, hovering at eye level as Fox searched the neon green font for the pertinent information. Finding it, he checked his wrist chronometer against the pod's launch time, and came up with the answer, "It was deployed about fifteen minutes ago."

"Then there's still time," Peppy declared, nodding with satisfaction as he crossed his arms. Implying Fox and Falco, he continued, "You two should get down to the hanger and prep yours Arwings for flight. Show Miyu the ropes on mine while you're down there. You could be launching in less than half an hour if we time things right."

The two younger mercenaries looked at each other and hesitated, both having the same question on their minds but neither willing to ask it with the lynx sitting on a couch on the opposite side of the room.

"Don't make me repeat myself," Peppy said, taking on the tone of an angry father, "I know you don't like the situation, but thanks to the government's wonderful bureaucracy, we really don't have a choice, alright? Slippy's not going, I'm not going, that's it."

Fox shrugged in defeat and Falco cursed under his breath, both sneaking a glance at the lynx who seemed to be enjoying every minute of their dissatisfaction. Her smug smile and relaxed posture gave it clean away. Her right arm hung off the back of the couch and her legs were crossed at the ankle; she could've been watching an amusing movie if judged from her physical bearing alone.

Her appearance had changed a little since earlier on. The massive amount of bandage work that had been done both visibly and under the clothing had been reduced to a few stitch holders, the small white bandage on her forehead most prominent. She wore the same black T-shirt and olive-green cargo pants as before, but she had recently been equipped with a grey flight vest, identical to the ones worn by the other two active pilots on the team. Exposed by the short sleeves of her shirt, a thin, light blue sheath ran down her left arm to just past the elbow. It didn't appear to have much to it, but the ultra-weave construction of the material guaranteed that she wouldn't disrupt the shoulder joint as it finished healing.

Her long, thin ears were pricked and attentive though, and she met the mercenaries' eyes with an even, confident stare of her own. Drawing her legs closer to her, she shifted her weight and pushed herself up off the couch.

"C'mon boys," she said, stretching as she got to her feet, a hint of faux-playfulness in her voice, "Promise I don't bite."

* * *

"Sir, the _Grenadier's _shields are down and our long-range missile pods are cold. Reloading."

"Captain Vera," Hartford called through the com system, "You're cleared for your attack run on the trailing enemy frigate."

"Roger that, Hartford," came the reply, followed by distorted commands as the Captain of the _Hammerhead _began barking commands to his own crew.

The thick, orange gases of Sector Z grew even denser as the chase had progressed, to the point where visual sighting was virtually useless. The trailing end of the enemy frigate ahead of them could just barely be made out against the backdrop of whirling vapor, but other than that, both Cornerian ships were entirely dependent on sensor navigation. And even that was limited. Just beyond the _Grenadier, _the _Cipher _was little more than a blip on the edge of the radar screen. Hartford knew something had to be done soon if he ever hoped to catch it.

The husky watched with more surprise than he wanted to admit as the C.N.S. _Hammerhead's _engines suddenly flared up. A visible shockwave tore through the gas cloud that surrounded them as it appeared as though the frigate took off like a rocket, doubling its speed with astonishing haste. He knew from briefings that it was how frigates like the _Hammerhead _attacked, but he had never seen a charge first hand. It was impressive to say the least.

It closed ground rapidly with the _Grenadier_, as Hartford silently urged his own _Broadsword _to speed up so he could witness the intentional collision that was to come. But the cruiser couldn't even hope to match the speeds attained by the _Hammerhead, _and the frigate quickly fell out of visual sight as it raced ahead. With the enemy's shields down, it stood little chance again the unique weapon of the Cornerian ship, and somehow, despite not being able to see the initial impact, Hartford doubted he would be let down by the results of the charge. He wasn't disappointed.

A sharp but hollow _crack _pulsed through the gas cloud, reverberating eerily through the _Broadsword _as the _Hammerhead _made contact with the _Grenadier_. It was followed closely by the rapid crackling of hull plates buckling, superstructure supports snapping, and systems misfiring. Finally, a deafening _boom _rocked the _Broadsword_ hard as a frigate's reactor went up, the tiny gas particles surrounding them conveying the force of the explosion with surprising clarity. Hartford was almost positive that he knew which frigate had survived the epic collision, but it still gave him relief when he heard the com hiss to life.

"Scratch one frigate," Captain Vera's voice rang out, a chorus of cheers echoing from his crew in the background. "It'll take a few moments to realign our engine core, but then we'll be right back with you, Hartford. We still got enough fuel for one more charge."

"Good to hear, Vera," Hartford replied, wanting to say more but unable to as he gawked at what he made out through his cruiser's massive viewport.

The first thing he saw was a shadow; one that seemed unusually large and solid. Then, it abruptly burst from the gasses of Sector Z, tumbling through the vapor with a velocity that seemed unnatural. It cleared the _Broadsword _by a safe margin, but the tiny bits of metal and junk it threw off from the centrifugal force of its spin buffeted the cruiser's shields. A disembodied bank of engines appeared next, hurtling off on a perpendicular angle to Hartford's vessel, hurled away by the detonation that had just taken place. It was only a moment later that they saw the full aftermath of the _Hammerhead_'s attack.

It was as if they had just stumbled across an enormous debris graveyard. Tremendous chunks of space-grade metal and alloy drifted outward at a startlingly fast rate, expanding from an explosion that had literally blown a hole in the gas cloud itself, creating a sphere of empty space without vapor. The _Broadsword _had little to fear from the debris, as since they were following directly behind the plow-equipped _Hammerhead_, they had a clean path through. However, it didn't stop Hartford from feeling a shiver run down his spine. Any one of those massive hunks of former frigate could've taken out his cruiser had they struck it head on.

The _Hammerhead _itself was just emerging from shadow immediately ahead of them, still on its original course but only now just resuming cruising speed. Hartford looked over it both visually and on the digital wireframe readout on the viewport; it had barely taken any damage. The massive plow on the front of the frigate had done its part, tearing through alloy with almost disgusting ease, and leaving the rest of the ship untouched. To say the young husky was impressed was an understatement.

The weapon's officer interrupted his observations though.

"Captain, the _Cipher _is in range. Missile pods have been reloaded and are standing by to fire."

"Good," Hartford replied, bracing himself on the railing of his command dais, "Fire as soon as you get a good lock-"

"Sir!" the sensor officer exclaimed suddenly, jumping up from his console and turning his head up to the captain, "The energy output of the _Cipher _just tripled!"

The captain's mouth went agape at the sudden news. "Is it a weapons signature?" he asked hurriedly.

"Not any that I've seen before, sir," the officer replied, sounding more and more worried, "It's being directed to the fore of the frigate; perpendicular to us. If it's a weapon it's not aiming very well."

"What could it be doing…" he wondered aloud in a normal speaking voice, looking quizzically out the viewport he was level with. Suddenly, his eyes went wide and his heart rate beat into overdrive. "P-pull back!" Hartford barked out to the helmsman, "It could be overloading its reactor. We need to get the hell out of here!"

"Hartford, we're going in hard," Captain Vera's voice once again overtook the com, "We'll stop them before they can do whatever it is-"

A massive shockwave shook the _Broadsword _as its engines tried to comply with a complete reverse, and they struggled to bring the cruiser to a halt from full cruising speed. The lights in the command area dimmed briefly as all available energy was shunted to the navigation system, including the communications systems as they briefly stopped working, interrupting Captain Vera. Despite all of the _Broadsword's _efforts though, they couldn't argue with physics, and they continued forward long enough to emerge into another, larger clearing in the orange vapors of Sector Z.

The engines sputtered and gave out, overloaded by the massive strain put on them to stop the massive ship so suddenly. Still surrounded on all sides by gas, it had cleared just enough to make the visual identifications possible, though when it did, a sinking feeling in the pit of Hartford's stomach made him immediately wish that it hadn't.

The _Cipher_ indeed sat perpendicular to them relatively nearby, but from what Hartford could tell, it wasn't the enemy frigate itself that was creating an energy spike. Surrounding the forward bow of the ship was a ring of roughly cylindrical boulders, floating in a perfect circle and spinning around the vessel in a slow, deliberate fashion. Even from kilometers away, Hartford could see that a sheath of energy was beginning to form around the _Cipher_, a faint, greenish glow that gradually surrounded the frigate like a layer of translucent skin. It stood in a stark, supernatural contrast to orangish hue of the rest of Sector Z around it.

It wasn't asked by anyone, but the sensors officer placed a zoom window on the lower right corner of the viewport as the ship's systems came back online, a digital pane that had amplified the image a hundred times over. With the close up, more detailed image, Hartford could make out a series of ruts that had been carved into the massive rocks. The fractures were beginning to glow the same eerie green as the energy sheath surrounding the _Cipher, _and the boulders began to speed their vertical orbit of the ship. Jolts of lightening began crackling across the surface of the vessel, closely accompanied by a distant humming as the entire apparatus continued to build energy.

The shiver down Hartford's spine had turned into a cold panic.

The _Hammerhead _then suddenly soared into view, charging again as its engines flared and it approached the _Cipher _and its ring of boulders with incredible speed. Hartford wanted to reach out and call them off, to warn Captain Vera about what the _Broadsword's _sensors had picked up, but he already knew it was too late. There was no way the _Hammerhead _could slow down in time once it had achieved ramming speed. All he could do was stand by and do nothing as the rocks continued to rotate faster and faster, the ethereal hum growing lower and lower until it entirely occupied the bass range. A storm of energy poured across the _Cipher_, and the transparent emerald glow suddenly turned opaque as the _Hammerhead _rapidly approached.

"Utilities, power the entire ship down except emergency life support and shields," Hartford said without inflection and a cold lack of haste, "Something tells me we're going to need the energy."

Nobody on the bridge questioned the Captain as one by one the consoles winked off, followed closely by the overhead bridge lights. Similar events were occurring throughout the _Broadsword _as corridor running lights flickered off and various crew stations powered down. The entire crew sat in total darkness, whether they were on the bridge or in one of the many subsystems of the hull, transfixed by what they saw out of the vessel's many forward facing viewports. Not a word was spoken throughout the entire ship. Breathing was slow and silent until it seemed as though the entire crew simultaneously held their breath.

The massive amount of energy pent up in the strange arrangement of boulders released in a torrent of destructive force, consuming the _Cipher _and surging outward like an earthquake fault. An arm of the deadly electricity reached out and snatched the still charging _Hammerhead _like a toy, drawing it in to the center of the maelstrom with astounding speed. The bass humming rumbled through the ship in tremors, shaking Hartford to his very bones as the rush of energy swept towards the _Broadsword_, growing to quickly encompass the entire viewport.

The energy seemed to gather into a fist, and it reached out for the _Broadsword_. For him.

* * *

My apologies about the long delay between updates; that whole school thing's kinda been taking a big chunk of time.

BizzarreCoyote: Thanks for the review; I appreciate the kind words :)

RedBay: As always, thank you for the truly epic review buddy. I don't think I can list out every point you made here, but believe me when I say that I really read each and every word of your reviews and try to apply them to my writing. And sure; I'd love to see your writing! I'm not sure what a 'trigger' scene is, but as long as it isn't overly explicit, post away!

Northern-megas: Thanks! Those are exactly the adjectives I was going for, haha :) As for the timeline, I was shooting for a little after the events of Lylat Wars (Star Fox 64 to my fellow Americans): I think I said a year or so somewhere back in the earlier chapters.

Like always, let me know what you guys/gals think! In particular, I'm a little unsure of how the bridge/capital ship scenes with Hartford flow with the story. But, any and all types of feedback are welcome and encouraged. And once again, my sincerest thanks to all my readers.


	12. Chapter 12: Into the Breech

**XII****: **_Into the Breech_

"El-Tee, we're approaching a gap in the cloud. We should breach it in about thirty seconds."

"Copy that Flight Sergeant; take Red flight on forward scout duty. Put some distance between yourselves and the rest of convoy and keep in contact."

"Roger, sir."

Like the silent monoliths of debris that surrounded them, the convoy of sixteen glided gracefully through the murky, sky blue gases of Sector X, causing minute disturbances in the vapor as they passed on their way. The quartet of long, streamlined freighters proceeded single file through the azure cloud, their soft orange engine glows dimmed and diluted somewhat by the omnipresent vapors of the sector. A quiet humming, occupying the audible scale normally reserved for white noise, could be heard by every pilot in the convoy, a result of the gas particles carrying sound that would normally be lost in the vacuum of space.

For Bill Grey, it was somehow both eerie and comforting at the same time.

He sat with his gloved hands resting gently on the flight stick, loosely gripping it and tilting it slightly in one direction or another whenever his fighter fell out of escort formation. His diamond of four starfighters – including himself – drifted opposite of Lieutenant Calloway's, the two flights flying at the halfway point between the second and third transports in the string. There had been tiny variations ever since they entered the sector about twenty minutes ago, but all things considered, his CDF fighter had moved very little relative to the rest of the convoy.

"_Lucky," _the restless hound thought to himself as he watched Rhena Haggerty's quartet of identical fighters pull ahead of the lead transport, disappearing into another bank of denser sapphire vapors. The tiny wakes they left were soon eclipsed by the much larger one the head freighter left as it too plowed through the gaseous wall, followed soon by the rest of the space-faring party.

Bill breathed out as his cockpit canopy became enshrouded in the thicker layers of gas, reducing him to a fly-by-sensors method of piloting, at least for a few moments. In no time at all though, he went from zero visibility to a crystal clear vista as he emerged from the other end of the vapor wall. The hound sighed again, but this time, it was less from annoyance, and more of an exhale of contentment. It was times like these that made him realize no matter how many sorties he flew for the Cornerian Fleet, in however many exotic locations, he would never cease to be amazed by the natural wonders of space.

The convoy had emerged in a natural phenomenon known to the pilots as a null-river. Generally protected on both sides by walls of unusually dense gas, null-rivers were essentially inverse paths through a nebula or vapor cloud. Whereas one might see an isolated ribbon of mist in deep space and compare it to a stream, in the depths of a Sector X, the presence of a long, thin band of empty space created the appearance of an inverse river where it was the _lack_ of gas that was the defining feature. It didn't occur often, but when the proper gravitational forces aligned, a null-river could stretch from one side of the gas cloud to the other, creating a clean shot through and allowing vessels to travel through without the sensor-dimming dangers of flying through the gas.

Bill wasn't concerned with the safety bonuses the null-river produced though; it was the ambiance it offered. Tiny imperfections in the cloud makeup of both sides lent the sector an organic feel, much like that of a raging storm front. Tiny strings of the azure vapor had trailed off of Red Flight as they had soared out of the near side of the cloud moments before him, gradually thinning until they tapered off completely. The null-river, by the will of nature, happened to line up perfectly with the brilliantly shining beacon of Sol, the Lylat System's youthful, exuberant star. Warm, golden sunlight, normally invisible in the interstellar void, filtered through the tiny particles of vapor Red Flight left behind, making them sparkle like dew after a rain shower.

This tapestry of colors -- the brilliant blond of the unimpaired star, the ubiquitous cerulean of the Sector X field, and the deep, strong red of the convoy's engines – swirled together in an orchestra of light and hollow sound.

Bill smiled, suddenly becoming wistful. _"What I wouldn't give to share a sight like this with someone-"_

Sirens blared to life and the minimal colored lines of his HUD suddenly faded from a soothing blue to an angry orange, interrupting his quiet thoughts as training took over. A familiar female voice burst across the squadron wide communications channel.

"I've got multiple contacts emerging from the opposite side of the null-river, weapons powered and charging on attack vectors. Looks like we've found our troublemakers; they've got a pair of corvettes with them."

* * *

Miyu couldn't deny that she was impressed with the Arwing Fighter she was currently sitting in.

The canopy sat open, the transparent covering extended towards the ceiling of the _Great Fox_'s hanger on a hinge as she listened half-heartedly to Fox explain one subsystem or another. He was standing on the top rung of a squat access ladder, leaning over the lip of the cockpit and occasionally pointing out a certain toggle or switch. There wasn't a single excess word shared between them, the vulpine eager to get his impromptu tutorial over with, and the lynx refusing to offer more than a one syllable response to any question. Despite the strong feeling of distrust for the one giving them though, she did learn enough from his instructions to admire the starfighter.

"The pair of cannons were standard for a Heavy Bomber when we found them and mounted 'em, but Slippy boosted the output and range," he went on, "They tend to overheat though if you just lay on the trigger, so try to fire in bursts…"

He reached across her and grabbed the flight stick, squeezing the trigger a few times so as to demonstrate what he meant. She watched him with feigned disinterest; on the inside she was listening intently, making a mental note at every one of his talking points, but she put up a façade to make sure it wasn't known to the mercenary instructor. Miyu couldn't quite put her finger on it, but there was just something about the vulpine that justified the behavior in her mind. To add an extra layer to her charade, she snorted dismissively, interrupting his explanations.

Fox stopped midsentence and stared blankly at her for a second before dipping his head and withdrawing his hand from the joystick. "Okay," he said with a hint of contempt, gripping the lip of the cockpit and rearing his head back to stare at the rafters of the hanger, stretching his neck muscles, "Normally, given recent events, I could honestly care less what happens to _you _out there, alright? You could survive, you could die…whatever. But you're flying Peppy's Arwing, _our _Arwing. And I'll be Falco's friggin' uncle before I let you…"

"_What I wouldn't give to be able to push him off that ladder right now," _Miyu thought to herself as she watched Fox continue his speech, _"I could close the canopy, tractor my ship with this one, and blast outta those doors before anyone could stop me." _The lynx smiled inwardly at the thought, but quickly shook it from her mind. _"Nah…they've probably rigged up a remote system to this fighter; I'd never get two feet off the hanger deck. Besides, I'm…kinda looking forward to this."_

The realization took her by surprise, even as Fox had apparently given up his sermon and descended the ladder, leaving the lynx to herself in the cockpit. Was she really looking forward to flying a sortie with that fox and his crew? Even after all they had done to her? She stared straight ahead at the Arwing's dashboard, her cobalt eyes starting to water from a lack of blinking. Her thoughts were stuck in an endless loop, always coming back to a certain truth that she simply couldn't admit to herself. She was eager to get back behind a flight stick; she was looking forward to flying again. And given some of her past employers, McCloud's crew didn't seem like the shadiest of troupes to be flying for…

"_I guess it's just a pilot's itch,_" she finally supposed, shrugging and shaking any thoughts of complimenting the fox out of her head, "_Nothing more than a want to get back in space again." _It seemed like a logical argument for her sudden lack of overbearing animosity towards Fox McCloud, but as much as she tried to accept it, a tiny, niggling doubt refused to shut its quiet little voice in the back of her mind. A little voice that told her there was something else to her unusual want to work with the Star Fox team.

Ever since accepting the request from the old hare Fox called Peppy, Miyu had started a fight with herself she was destined to lose; an effort to suppress a feeling she knew she in the end couldn't. It wasn't so much some sudden crush or attraction; she had ruled that out as soon as she realized he could die tomorrow and she wouldn't so much as blink. Hell, she'd probably wear a smug smile that day. Instead, the emotion was more one of grudging respect. In a last ditch effort to delay her realization of this though, she again shook her head clear of thought – physically this time – and glanced over at the pair of mercenaries on the hanger floor to take her mind off of things.

Fox and one of his pilots – Falco, according to the gruff introduction in the hallway -- were hauling what appeared to be heavy-duty ballistics from an open magazine in the wall of the docking bay to the much smaller magazine of another Arwing Fighter. The job was proceeding slowly and, if the strained faces of the mercs' faces were any indicator, painfully. An android, only vaguely resembling the biped beings of the Lylat System, was busy at work on her own fighter, putting the mercenaries to shame as it picked up a missile and transported it solo. But, progress was being made, and it wasn't too long until they muscled the last weapon into place and closed the magazine hatch for the Arwing they were working on.

Miyu snorted at the absurdity of the situation as she watched. He had shot her down, destroyed her ship and only truly valuable piece of property, essentially brought her back to life, let her go, and knocked her out again. Her feelings towards him had progressed from hell-bent vengeance, to slightly less hell-bent vengeance, to a more practical hatred. And now, she was flying a mission beside him. _For _him, in fact.

She chuckled and couldn't help but grin, cocking her head to the side and scratching one slender ear as she rolled her eyes. _"If Mum and Dad could see the mess I've gotten myself into now…"_

A commotion from below interrupted her thoughts as a sudden air of emergency overtook the hanger of the _Great Fox_ like a cloud.

She peered over the edge of the cockpit just in time to meet Fox coming up to tell her something; he had jumped up the step ladder without her even hearing. The result was that the vulpine's face was abruptly inches from hers, startling her into letting out a tiny _yip_, something she immediately regretted and covered with a scowl as she backed off. The scent of hard work and toil emanated from him and assaulted her nostrils, furthering the lynx's reason to glower at the mercenary. Past him, Miyu could see Falco vaulting into the open cockpit of his own Arwing, neglecting the access ladder altogether.

"We just got word from Peppy," he said with edge in his voice, betraying his bitterness from minutes before, not noticing anything odd about what had just happened, or not expressing it if he did, "We found the convoy. Time to launch."

* * *

"Gold Flight, on me!"

"Roger sir!"

"Scratch one bogey…"

"Someone push this guy off me; I can't shake 'im!"

"Who's covering the transports?"

"On my way Gamma Eight; hold tight."

"Shields down! I'm under heavy-"

"Whoa! What was that? Was that Three?"

"Gamma Three is down; repeat, Three is gone."

"Goddamn 'vettes! Where're those mercs?!"

The chaos of battle swirled around him like a fog, seeping into his pores and embracing him from within. Outside his canopy, the combatants streaked by like the very laser cannon blasts they fought with, dancing a deadly, deadly waltz of survival around him. The com channels were a constant mess of static and sound, voices calling desperately for help, or reporting a kill. Strange noises of battle, the normal audio effects of firing and scoring shots warped and shifted by the sparse gas particles present in the null-river, buffeted his fighter as much as enemy lasers and drifting debris, both derelict and fresh.

Bill Grey breathed in deep and twisted his hands tighter onto the flight stick, drifting to the right to avoid a burst of fire from one of the enemy corvette-class ships. The deadly energy seared by without harming his CDF Fighter, but he abandoned his run on the larger vessel all the same, pulling back on the stick and peeling back towards the main scramble between the starfighters of the unknown raiders and Gamma Squadron. He quickly glanced out his canopy and was relieved to see visual confirmation that his wingman had survived the abandoned assault, and was hugging his left wingtip like a magnet.

"Ease off, Six," he called to his wingman over the com, "Loosen up and get back far enough to cover me; let's see if we can't draw some of these guys off."

"Sir!" came the reply, a quick and justifiably spartan response given the combat situation.

The pair of sleek CDF craft charged back into the fray, dodging and weaving when necessary but largely holding their formation. Tiny targeting boxes popped up all over Bill's canopy and his HUD sprang to life, identifying potential enemies and friendly ships and tracking their movements. The hound's sharp, combat trained eyes scanned the field as he approached the cloud of starfighters, huddled around the Blue Arrow freighters. Diving down from above, Bill suddenly noticed one of the green boxes, indicating a fellow member of Gamma Squadron, had begun to flicker yellow, followed closely by a voice over the com.

"This is Eleven, I need some help!"

"Hold tight Eleven, Five and Six on our way," Bill responded, banking to the left and goosing his thrusters, soaring past a dozen smaller dogfights as he headed towards the endangered pilot.

Quickly catching the raider on Eleven's tail, the Flight Sergeant lined up behind them, angling for a good shot at the trailing enemy. An abrupt cut to the left by Gamma Eleven, and the raider's identical maneuver, failed to shake Bill and his wingman, and soon his targeting crosshair began animating and flashing red.

A stream of verdant energy erupted from beneath the CDF fighter as he squeezed the trigger, splashing the raider's rear shields with light. The protective bubble surrounding the marauder flashed and disappeared, signaling the pilot's impending demise. The enemy sensed this and veered off to the right, but before Bill could pursue, a siren blared to life in his cockpit, followed closely by what felt like someone punching his fighter from behind. His shield gauge flashed orange and he swerved to the side, away from his sudden assailant.

Bill's head and torso spun around as he glanced out the back of his canopy, spotting the enemy fighter and cursing out loud as vicious red lasers lanced out at him. The enemy cockpit was opaque, and the sleek, wrench-like front of his craft seemed to reach out towards the hound like a hand.

"Six, get this guy off me!" Bill called into the com, receiving only silence as he continued to duck and weave his fighter in an effort to escape. "Six?"

A scream ripped across the communications channel as an explosion rocked his ship, the tiny numeral six on the bottom right of his HUD winking off. Bill stared at the empty spot on the list of twelve numbers, almost confused at why it would go off, his mind unable to immediately register the reality. His fighter was rocked again by fire from his pursuer, and he instinctively pulled up sharply, applying the air-brakes and coming to a jarring halt. The move was risky, as if his pursuer saw it fast enough, he would be able to stop quickly and Bill would be a sitting duck. The Cornerian pilot was lucky though, and the raider tore by, realizing his mistake and engaging his boosters. Bill ignored him as Gamma Eleven's voice again called out.

"Five, where are you?" he stammered, his status number on Bill's HUD flashing to orange.

Bill quickly found the friendly pilot on his radar and shot off at full speed towards him, eager to save his fellow squadmate. He proceeded unhindered back into the cloud of starfighters, noticing as he did that there seemed to be more Cornerian ID tags than enemy, giving him a sense of relief only increased by the presence of all four Blue Arrow freighters. Another friendly voice, one that he quickly recognized, came over the com.

"This is Nine," the voice that he knew belonged to Rhena said, "Enemy corvettes are approaching, followed closely by another squadron and a half of snubfighters. Repeat, enemy reinforcements inbound. Looks like mixed bombers and fighters."

An almost audible silence reigned over the com as the reality of the situation sunk in. Another eighteen fighters against their battered single squadron were no odds to fight under. Add on top of that the pair of corvettes that were minutes away from the fight and closing, and any sane pilot would've turned tail and fled. But, as every Cornerian pilot's sunken heart knew, that wasn't a choice.

Bill nudged his fighter to the right, goosing his thrusters and closing space between himself and Gamma Eleven's pursuer. Once again, his crosshairs flashed red, and he flipped a tab on his joystick, linking his laser cannons to fire tandem shots instead of one at a time. The marauder must've noticed him, as the enemy fighter feinted to the left before jamming hard to the right, breaking his harassment of Gamma Eleven in an effort to escape Bill's targeting. Grey followed suit, unfazed by the trick maneuver and easily able to keep line of sight with the enemy. The distance between them closed further.

"Friendly coming through!"

Another enemy fighter suddenly appeared in front of him, barreling straight towards him in an apparently suicidal charge. Bill coolly kicked his ship up on its side, standing it on the wingtip and letting the new enemy pass by, meters from his own fighter's belly. He felt the backwash of the kamikaze pilot's engines as he passed. The CDF fighter that was chasing the enemy swerved a little to give Bill some room as it tore by too in hot pursuit.

The near miss didn't affect Bill's aim at all as he calmly lined up the shot, tightening his index finger on the trigger.

Green lasers raked the back surface of the naked enemy, still without shields from Bill's first attempt at taking it down. This time though, the raider didn't have the luxury of others in the area to provide a distraction; his own excessive boosting had taken the pair away from the main group of fighters. His own flight to escape proved to be his downfall as jade lasers ate away at his hull, melting support spars and setting off flammable ordinance and fuel. All it took was that one critical shot to the reactor…

Bill scored it, just as the raider was banking to the right. The back of his ship disintegrated as an explosion shook it apart, slicing up through the hull and detonating the vessel in a spectacular fireball that quickly faded in the void of space. They were close enough to the near side of the null-river that the various chunks of debris soon disappeared into the blue gasses of Sector X, leaving no trace of the enemy's existence.

"Splash another," Bill reported coldly, feeling that chill in his spine that he had experienced so many times before.

It wasn't the fact that members of his squadron were dying; he had accepted that fact long ago as a simple fact of combat. Instead, he realized it was something more topical as he banked back towards the fight, taking his time in order to let his shields regenerate from the beating they took. Bill scanned the battlefield as he approached it, noting that of the twelve members of Gamma Squadron that had begun the fight, ten were still flying. Amongst them, Bill secretly hoped a certain pilot had survived the initial dogfighting. The kid who had objected the mission back on Katina.

The brief lull in the fighting ensued as the flight of remaining enemy fighters retreated and regrouped with their corvettes and new squadron of raiders. For a moment, someone who stumbled across the conflict from down the null-river would've witnessed a scene akin to that of the ancient gang fights, back on land. Two factions, regrouping on their own respective sides of the street, taking a moment's respite to reorganize before charging back headlong into the fray. It was almost as if they were staring each other down.

The ten remaining fighters of Gamma Squadron regrouped into their flights, two of the three with a noticeable lack of a fourth member; only Rhena's flight had emerged without casualty. They huddled tight around the four Blue Arrow freighters, appearing unsure of what to do next. Unfortunately, they didn't have much time to spare; the enemy camp was closing quickly, and the menacing clouds of Sector X behind them only reminded them that escape through the gases would only delay the inevitable.

Across the way, and speeding towards the Cornerians, the unknown raiders who had started the fight swarmed angrily. A full score of fighters, most of them fresh reinforcements, flew with very loose cohesion, each trying to edge the others out for that first shot at Gamma Squadron. Just behind them, the relatively massive corvette-class vessels, roughly ten times the size of a snubfighter and shaped as though someone had taken the keel of a flat-hulled boat and placed it on top of another, bristled with weaponry, and were making impressive time themselves. An array of deadly turrets dotted their surface, and a pair of main guns, large enough to contain a one of the CDF Fighters within them, all bore down on the pilots of Gamma Squadron.

Bill swallowed as he formed up with the remaining pair of pilots under his command. _"This isn't good."_

"We have to give the transports room," Calloway's voice again overtook the com, "Gamma Squadron, form on me. Blue Arrow, I strongly recommend you guys retreat back into the cloud-"

"Not happenin' Calloway," the freighter captain replied over the squadron channel, his rough voice contrasting the smooth commands of the Lieutenant, "We're the ones who left without backup; we'll be pulling our fair share of the fight. Besides, if we're bein' honest here, they're probably after what we're carryin'. They ain't gonna be shootin' us down anytime soon."

"That's much appreciated," the Lieutenant answered, sounding only slightly grateful to the freighter captain. Bill knew exactly why too; despite the captain's insistence, they probably were going to become more of a burden of protection then an asset in offense.

"Sir, Nine again," Rhena reported, "Enemy formation is entering combat range. What're your orders?"

"We don't have the weaponry to deal with the corvettes," Calloway said with almost audible heaviness, "We'll have to hold off the fighters for now until those mercenaries arrive."

"And if they don't?"

The com crackled with empty static as the first, errant laser blasts began flashing around the squadron, slowly growing more accurate as the enemy approached. Bill could almost hear the Lieutenant in deep contemplation, wanting to say something reassuring in response, but unable to bring himself to say it. The weary hound couldn't blame his superior though; how do you tell nine other pilots that they probably wouldn't survive the next ten minutes? The answer, which was the same one as the cougar apparently came up with, was deceptively simple. You don't.

Calloway, at the tip of the flying wing formation, engaged his thrusters and charged deep into the enemy formation, followed closely by the rest of the squadron, eerily silent over the com as they too seemed to realize their fate. Bill couldn't help but admire them for not turning tail and running, even as he lined up a shot with one of the lead raiders. And while he also admired how calm and quiet everyone seemed to be, he wasn't disappointed when it didn't last long. The two sides met with a vengeance, and the battle was again joined.

The Flight Sergeant saw a stream of verdant laser bolts erupt from the right side of his peripheral, spewing forth from another CDF Fighter nearby. Sparing a glance out his canopy, he saw the words 'Lieutenant A. Calloway' emblazoned in bright yellow font just below the cockpit of the fighter, and raising his line of sight revealed the surprisingly calm cougar. Quickly selecting the Lieutenant's unlucky target as his own, Bill shifted his own fighter's nose to the right, drawing a bead and letting loose with his cannons. The combined fire brought the enemy bomber's shields down in a literal flash, exposing the tinted cockpit to the deadly energy. A single bolt punctured the opaque material, shunting the bubble of atmosphere inside in an explosive decompression, shredding the cockpit and reducing the ship to a pilotless hulk.

And suddenly, the two waves of starfighters were past each other, each having scored only a few blows in the fast-paced joust. Taking his eyes off the space in front of him for a moment, Bill checked the radar at the bottom of his HUD, noting with a grim smile that the Cornerian side had only suffered one casualty on that pass.

He was just about to loop around for another pass when he saw the pair of larger warships bearing down on him, side by side and almost glowing with the powerful weapons they fired. Panic couldn't even catch the speed of his tactical mind, though. Bill swung his ship to the right and gently tapped the air breaks, dodging the first salvo and falling into the backwash behind his lieutenant's fighter. The corvettes were too close to swerve away from, and it appeared that Calloway knew it also; they were going to have to split them.

Simultaneously, the pair of CDF fighters lit their boosters, streaking on a course that would take the pilots directly between the larger raider ships. The turrets of the corvettes wouldn't risk damaging each other if they missed the intruding Cornerians, and by the time the CDF fighters got through, they'd be moving too fast to track. In theory, it sounded like a flawless way out of a snap decision snafu.

As the menacing turrets swiveled to face the oncoming pair of fighters though, Bill's heart raced and his perception slowed. The turrets had moved too fast. They weren't supposed to do that. Before he could warn the Lieutenant, they were between the lengthy corvettes, too late to back out. Bill knew what he would see before it even happened. All he could do was angle upwards to get out of the way of the inevitable explosion ahead of him.

Four smoke trails, remnants of the turret-mounted railgun projectiles, sprouted from either side of Bill like threads of vapor, connecting the Lieutenant's fighter to the warships on each side. The heavy slugs tore through the shields of the sleek fighter, snapping off the left wing and gutting the ship from underneath. Tiny bits of debris buffeted Bill's shields as he pulled up and out of the way, even as a secondary explosion from the severed wing nub threw what remained of the lifeless CDF fighter into the unforgiving hull of the right-side corvette. The explosion was soundless, but it still reverberated through Bill like a thunderclap.

"No," he said aloud in an incredulous tone as he pulled the flight stick as far toward him as he could. There was no drama or surprise to his voice; only disbelief. Cold disbelief.

He barrel-rolled his fighter as the vapor trails of the railgun turrets whizzed past him, narrowly missing the agile ship. One ricocheted off the outer layers of the protective bubble, but the grazing hit alone was enough to cause sirens to blare in his cockpit. Bill glanced at his shield gauge with confusion, even as he continued to dodge and weave away from the corvettes, and saw that is was only half-empty, which meant the alarms had to be sounding for a different reason. Straining his neck, he snuck a glimpse behind him, and spotting the source of his distress system's panic.

"Lieutenant Calloway has been shot down," the computerized voice of Bill's combat computer reported over the squadron channel, alerting every Cornerian pilot of their commander's demise, "First Flight Sergeant William Grey is acting commander of Gamma Squadron."

The sight of the three raiders on his tail burned fresh in the hound's mind, replacing the searing image of the Lieutenant's last moments. Bill banked hard to the left, lining up with the solar flare of the Lylat System's star and squeezing out whatever juice was left in his thruster system. The two walls of Sector X's null-river, while far away, seemed to race by as he vainly tried to put distance between himself and his trio of pursuers. Bill's cockpit automatically dimmed and tinted as he flew towards Sol, and he silently hoped that the ancient flight jockey's trick of shaking visual pursuit by flying into the blinding light of a sun would work. His radar told another story though.

"This is Five," he yelled into the com. He allowed more worry into his voice than he would've normally wanted, but he simply couldn't care anymore, "I'm in trouble-"

It was all he could get off before his thrusters finally gave out and the three raiders trailing him got close enough to open fire. Their first shots rocked his ship through the shields, ending his com call abruptly and drawing a curse from the hound. His shield gauge flashed orange before draining to a blood red, indicating the system's last legs of protection. He juked and spun in a last ditch effort to escape fire, but angry crimson lasers continued to pepper his failing shields. For the second time in under a minute, time slowed.

Or maybe it had never returned to normal after Calloway's death. Bill couldn't tell. His hands were clammy, a layer of sweat making the heavy-duty plastic of the flight stick slippery and wet. He squinted. The tinted cockpit canopy failed to block all of the star's glare as he continued to fly towards it, his attempted escape maneuver failing miserably as the raiders on his six poured more and more energy into his fighter. Another layer was added to a cacophony of livid alarms as his last gradation of energy protection gave way under the withering fire. A flash of red tore by the left side of his canopy, drawing his attention to the blackened scar that now lay across his port wing. And yet all he could concentrate on were the elegant, flashing digital lines of his HUD.

The cluster of colored-coded dots of his radar had fallen behind as he flew further and further down the null-river, away from the swarm of red points consuming the green ones. Another number on his squadron roster winked out, leaving only half a dozen, all of which were burning a sickly yellow as they were besieged and one by one, whisked away from existence. A portrait had unfolded in the bottom left corner of his HUD as another laser blast struck home, rocking the hull of his battered fighter. In it, Bill could see the angry face of Rhena Haggerty, her carefully kept hair splayed out behind her with sweat, a coating of exertion apparent and shimmering through the fur on her face. She was screaming something at him, but he couldn't hear. He couldn't hear anything.

Nothing except the sweet sound of the various klaxons of his cockpit as he flew towards the sun, and his oblivion.

It reached out towards him with arms of light, the giant sphere of superheated gasses embracing him with care. Three streams of light stretched out to him, rushing by on either side and directly above him like corners of a triangle. Soon his entire canopy was consumed with the light Sol gave off, and the arms of fire that stretched out for him. The thought in the back of his mind came forward as time continued to slow, and he wondered if this was what it felt like to die. Bill had heard of and experienced the time-bending phenomenon that occurred in life-or-death situations as the brain slowed down perception in an effort to stay alive. Maybe death merely meant that time slowed down infinitely, to the point where the last thing one saw was the moment they stopped breathing.

It was a strange thing to think about, especially given his dire circumstances, so he shook the thought as much as he could, and instead did his best to focus on the surroundings. As he did, the echoes of alarms and the distant shouts from whoever was on the communications channel rose in pitch and clarity. Time gradually sped up as his brain registered the fact that he was still alive, and within milliseconds his senses had returned to normal. As if awakening from a dream, Bill had regained control of his mental situation and took stock of the physical, ignoring for the moment the desperate audio directed his way.

Immediately, he noticed something about the rays of sunlight reaching towards his CDF fighter. Strangely enough, the solar arms stretching towards him proved to be insubstantial, and were more collections of bolts of energy than actual straight beams. And they reached _past _him, almost as if they were seeking something immediately behind him. And suddenly, he saw why.

Like a flight of phoenix from the depths of Sol, three fighters shot past Bill with startling speed and proximity, cascading with them the streams of energy that had appeared to emerge from the star itself. Bill snapped his head to follow them, and then glanced down at his radar, seeing that he was suddenly alone with the newcomers; his trio of pursuers had abruptly dropped off the visible universe.

Bill suddenly grinned and sputtered with relief, taking a moment to sigh and lean back in his command chair as he did. His hands reached up and swiped the sheen of sweat that had leaked through his facial fur, and as he did, he noticed how they shook. The experience was easily the closest he could recall being to death, and the enormity of it threatened to flood his conscious with sentiment. He had almost died. His mind replayed the thought over and over until he was repeating it verbally to himself out loud. He had almost _died_. It took all that he had to slip the flight stick back between his fingers and retake control of his starfighter.

As soon as he felt the kick of the agile ship responding to his command though, he was back. Sentiment could be shoved into the deepest recesses of his mind until he could find time to deal with it later on. Emotion could wait. He was alive, and in control of a functioning ship. That's all that mattered.

"Hold tight Gamma Squadron; we're comin'," a familiar voice commanded over the open com, steeling Bill's new found confidence and sending his morale soaring.

Backup had arrived.

* * *

Woooo...that took awhile. Sorry guys, but you know...school :\

Sir Raphael: Thanks for the review! I would've explained those events and the Cipher a bit more, but I intentionally left it kinda cloudy. Mum's the word for why though; shhh...

BizzarreCoyote: Well thank you again, haha; I'm glad to hear you're enjoying the story :)

RedBay: Wow. I'm...I'm honestly blown away. I'm honored, dude. I've read your take on that scene of the chapter very closely, and first of all, you have a very visible talent for characterization. The way you dipicted Peppy in particular was something I've never quite seen before; very original. If you ever decide to pen a story of your own, be sure to let me know; after all the reviews you've left me, I certainly owe you one (more than one, actually, haha).

Stinger: Stinger! Haha, I'm sorry to hear about the soap...as well as your school's printer and my unpopularity with the technicians; I'll be sure to wear a disguise next time I'm around your school...wherever that may be, haha. But yeah, as to your review. First, I definitely agree with the idea that ship battles are akin to a slow motion dance; I've always held that idea in my mind while I write those scenes. I don't think I've actually written anything that well, but it's what I'm shooting for. And I'm glad to hear your feedback on Miyu; again, I don't know if I fully deserve those kind words, but I do fully appreciate them. And I think you'll like her in this chapter a bit more. Now, the idea of Slippy's characterization is something I've been a little shaky on myself; I was trying to make him seem completely opposite of his usual eager self for the duration of the concussion (which I wasn't intending to last a long time). But I realize how...odd, that makes him seem. So that problem should be taken care of soon.

It's good to hear from you again bro; I really do appreciate the review, and I hope all's going well for you. Oh, and no worries; I forgive your Englishness :)

Kavi Darkwolf: Thanks, Kav! I really do enjoy writting battle scenes, so those kind words mean alot. And I appreciate your critiques too; I went back over this chapter and tried to clarify some things because of them, actually. Thanks again; I appreciate it :)


	13. Chapter 13: Tip the Scales

**XIII: **_Tip the Scales_

"We've made contact, Peppy," Fox called in to the hare still aboard the _Great Fox,_ adjusting the earpiece and microphone unit he had attached to his right ear as he did so, "Activating sensor beacon now."

His words were followed by a sudden _ping _from his radar HUD. A flashing orange light occupied the virtual position his fighter's arrow had occupied an instant ago, broadcasting the spot's coordinates to any ship tuning into the channel. Namely, his mercenary outfit's capital ship, which was still lurking in the dense mists of the Sector X gas cloud somewhere nearby.

"Sheesh," Falco commented, whistling loud and low as he took in his own fighter's sensor readings noting the lower than expected number of Cornerian fighters, "The greenies have taken a hell of a beating. Hope Bill didn't bite it yet."

"Me too Falco," Fox replied, his portrait appearing on both of his wingmen's HUDs as he spoke. His expression was one of pure determination, hiding the fact that he was riding on a wave of adrenaline after offing three enemies in no time flat. "Stick together for now and concentrate on helping the Cornerian pilots; the freighters can wait."

Falco opened his mouth to respond, but before he could, Miyu's portrait popped up on the com channel, interrupting him and stealing the words from his mouth.

"Gotcha, McCloud," she said, nudging her fighter a bit closer to Fox's wing. She reached up and pushed her own earpiece into a more comfortable position in her left ear.

"…Yeah, what she said," the avian finished, rolling his eyes as he too tightened the formation and took up position on Fox's opposite wing.

Fox could see Falco's irritation through his HUD, but he decided not to reassure his friend further. The mercenary captain had had enough trouble simply convincing Falco to fly the mission, and the amount of guarantees and encouragement he had to offer bordered on patronizing. Any further requests to ignore the lynx's mannerisms would only result in Falco getting mad at Fox for the condescending treatment.

The vulpine glanced out the left side of his canopy as he engaged his Arwing's powerful boosters, his mouth pressed into a thin, neutral line by what he saw. Miyu's fighter kept pace with his own reasonably well, even if she often overcompensated when she pushed the Arwing a little too far to one side or the other. That was to be expected though; the Arwing fighter was a tough beast to tame as far as it's extremely touchy controls went. But once mastered, the sensitive layout of the flight stick allowed the ship to perform to whatever tune the pilot wanted. She seemed stable enough with the fine manipulations now, but Fox couldn't help but doubt her performance in the impending dogfights.

However, he didn't have any time to feed his misgivings about the fight as it suddenly rushed forward to meet him.

A CDF fighter soared by the outskirts of the two-sided brawl, spouting short, stabbing flames from its right wing and lazily trying to outmaneuver the pair of wrench-hulled raiders on its tail. The pilot swerved in front of the trio of oncoming Arwings, implicitly begging for assistance as the raiders stubbornly refused to be shaken. Fox complied.

Latching on to the end of the train of three fighters, the vulpine pilot easily lined up his first shot, squeezing the trigger and unable to prevent a grin from spreading across his face as the burst of lasers exploded against the enemy shields. He hadn't been in a large-scale dogfight since the end of the Lylat War, but despite the recent lack of this sort of action, he was eager to dive in and help. Falco and Miyu's shots lined up on the other of the pair of enemies, and before they could even react, their shields were down. Fox keyed his com as the raiders peeled off the CDF fighter, desperate to escape the sudden onslaught of fire.

"Split up and take it to 'em, guys," he said with a triumphant smile as his next burst of lasers struck home, vaporizing one of the raiders in a brilliant explosion of debris and energy. The remaining enemy tried to juke and dive down to break the line of sight, but Fox easily stayed with him. His targeting reticule pulsed red and he squeezed off another spout of deadly energy, walking it up the relatively tall backside of the raider. As he did, he couldn't help himself, overcome as he was with adrenaline.

"_Yee-haw!" _he screamed into his headset in time with the enemy's explosive demise, holding it to his ear with one hand and goosing his thrusters with the other.

* * *

Miyu cocked her head to the side and raised an eyebrow as Fox's primal yelp of gratification sounded over the com system, eliciting a snort of disdain from the lynx as she gently guided the flight stick up and to the left, finally let loose by the vulpine and impatient to score some kills of her own. She still tasted the proverbial blood from her first kill moments before, and it had revitalized a thirst for combat she had long been missing. Not even her last bout of space combat, deep in Meteos, could compare to the rush of nerves she was currently experiencing; perhaps because she knew first-hand that her wingmen were actually competent this time. Whatever it was, she drew confidence from them, though she refused to admit it to herself.

The sensitive reaction of her Arwing caught her off guard again though, and she had to ease the nose of the fighter back to the right. She growled with frustration; it was easy to understand _why _the sensitivity of the controls were kept at such a high level, but it didn't lessen her irritation any when she suffered as a consequence.

Just as she was cursing quietly to herself, the proximity alarm abruptly sounded as her Arwing's computer picked up someone on a near collision course with the lynx. A split second later, a train of fighters streaked by from behind; a boxier, larger raider in front, a CDF fighter in the middle, and a pair of the standard raider interceptors bringing up the rear. A portrait unfolded in the bottom left corner of Miyu's cockpit HUD, revealing the pilot of the CDF fighter sandwiched between the raiders, still in relatively good shape all things considered.

"Little help here, merc," the female wolf deadpanned, not even wincing as Miyu saw another shot from the raiders on the pilot's tail strike home.

She was the strangest military pilot Miyu could ever remember seeing. The wolf's fiery tresses drew most of the eyes' attention immediately, the loud coloring contrasting oddly with the barely stressed, business-like manner of the pilot's facial expression. The lynx couldn't help but question how she got away with that with the military's strict dress code, but she decided it could wait for another time.

Dipping her right wing, Miyu swooped in the same direction as the train of snubfighters and fell in line behind the trailing pair of raiders. Or, that's what she intended to do. What actually occurred was more of a twisted 'S' maneuver as she fought to compensate and recompensate for her Arwing's extremely touchy controls. She growled in frustration, struggling to line up even a glancing blow against the enemy craft, the pilots of which were well aware of the sudden intruder and weren't making it any easier for her. The very instant one of the craft would line up in her sights, it would immediately duck out of the way again, starting the tedious process of wrangling the Arwing anew.

Throwing caution to the wind, the next time her crosshairs lined up with a target, the lynx didn't hesitate. Squeezing the trigger once, a pair of neon green energy bolts leapt forth and rammed the back of the slower of the two targets. They were absorbed into the protective shielding of the fighter without any permanent damage, but it appeared to have caught the enemy pilot's attention. He banked hard to the left and out of Miyu's line of fire, reducing the number of enemies between her and the friendly pilot to one. Ignoring the runner, the lynx instead focused on eliminating the Cornerian's remaining pursuer, for good if at all possible.

A sudden blast from behind rocked her fighter though, drawing a curse and a glance to the radar. She cursed again, louder and with more feeling as she realized that her own negligence had allowed the enemy she scared off to circle around and take up position on _her _tail. The train of snubfighters had just grown another link to five.

"What's _taking _you so long, merc?" the Cornerian demanded, her portrait showing a bit more unease and worry than a minute before. The craft she was pursuing, at the very head of the procession, abruptly dove to relative south, taking the whole chain of fighters down with it and causing Miyu to almost loose pursuit. The lynx's shields took another hit as she continued to wrestle with the controls of her fighter, growing more frustrated by the second. Finally, she snapped.

Completely forfeiting any concern about the red-headed pilot she had hoped to save, she began firing randomly with little aim, holding down the trigger and simply brushing the crosshairs across the enemy fighter in the hopes of scoring a hit or two. Suddenly, with the unforeseen help of yet another solid shot on her rapidly draining shields, the Arwing shifted into perfect alignment with the raider between herself and the Cornerian, and a rapid succession of high-powered shots splashed against the enemy's shields.

The protection failed and the shields disappeared, leaving the enemy pilot vulnerable faster than he had expected. Miyu continued to discharge her weapons, even as the heating gauge in her HUD began to fill and glow orange. Simultaneously, her own shields continued to break down as hit after hit from behind drained them; sitting still had its advantages for aiming, but left the lynx a sitting duck to incoming fire. She gritted her teeth. It was just a matter of luck now.

The rapid stream of verdant energy finally sliced through the exposed rear of the enemy fighter, tearing it lengthwise on a slight diagonal and shearing it in half as volatile internal systems touched off. The two halves shot off towards opposite sides of the null-river as the reactor detonated.

"Gah!" Miyu exclaimed as she braced herself against another ship-rocking shot from behind, _"It's about friggin' time_."

A sudden rush of emotion swept through the lynx's body, pouring into her veins on the wave of adrenaline. She had just taken another pilot's life. It had been far too long since she had been able to chalk up a kill for herself, and she basked in feeling for a brief moment, temporarily ignoring the dangerous battlefield around her. After weeks of perpetual discomfort, she finally felt at home in the cockpit, even if the cockpit didn't belong to her. Despite her dangerous situation, she suddenly bore a determined grin as opposed to a frustrated snarl.

Now with a clear view to the Cornerian she had just saved, her Arwing's targeting computer automatically gauged the CDF fighter's overall hull and shield integrity and threw it up on her HUD. Both digital numbers were low and blood red, indicating the wolf pilot's surprisingly near-death status.

The com was anything but silent, but no "thank you" call came from the Cornerian, something the lynx would've been annoyed by if it weren't for the enemy pursuer on her tail, drawing her attention. The train of fighters was broken as the wolf dove away, now free to pursue her prey without hassle, leaving Miyu alone with her assailant.

She whipped her head around, spotting the fighter at the very edge of what rear view the Arwing's cockpit could afford her. Possessing a calm she hadn't before, she took a deep breath and anticipated the Arwing's reaction before she even began her maneuver. Kicking the left foot-yolk and pushing the blue and white fighter up on its side, she snap-rolled to the left and away from enemy fire.

It worked, and her assailant's shots soared past her into empty space. But in the moment it took for her to regain control of her vessel, he had lined back up on her backside.

She suddenly wished she was back in her own, more controllable fighter, as much as it paled in comparison to the ability of her current ride. As another enemy laser struck her rapidly fading rear shields, she opened her mouth to call for help, before snapping it shut again. Even as her shield gauge began flashing red, she found that the last thing she wanted to do was call for her wingmates. Luckily for her, she didn't have too.

"Hold tight, merc," the redheaded wolf called over the com, her portrait appearing briefly on Miyu's HUD as the military pilot spoke.

Miyu questioned momentarily how the Cornerian lupine could've taken down her prey so quickly as to offer the lynx help, but as she saw the approaching CDF fighter, the one she had so recently rescued, another question took precedence. Particularly one of evasion; the Cornerian ship was heading straight for her.

"_She's…she's not going to…"_

"Break _right_," the wolf again spoke, urgent but without haste.

Miyu didn't hesitate, jerking the flight stick in the proper direction and granting the charging friendly a clear shot at the enemy behind her. Almost before she dodged out of the way, laser fire began streaming from the Cornerian fighter, searing through the space Miyu had just occupied and ramming the shields of her former pursuer.

Engaging the booster to ensure she moved in time, the Arwing soared away, leaving the pair of fighters behind. As such, the lynx had no clue what had come of the head-to-head until she saw the red dot that had been so firmly attached to her own tiny icon on the radar disappear. In her little sector of the skirmish, the two green symbols representing herself and the Cornerian wolf were the only digital beings remaining.

"Alright merc, you're clear," the military pilot said, appearing worn yet still itching to fight on Miyu's HUD, "Time to get down to business."

The lynx had yet to say anything in response to the lupine, but Miyu had a feeling that she would like her the most of anyone she had met in the past month.

* * *

"Wooooo!" Falco screamed into the com, whooping in victory as another raider fell to his guns. He snap-rolled his Arwing in celebration as it tore through the expanding debris cloud of his kill, the rock music blaring in his cockpit soaring in tempo with his dogfighting. Like a predator hungry for a meal, he looped back towards the main cloud of fighters, one that had been rapidly shrinking as the mercenaries began tipping the struggle back in the Cornerians' favor.

Four kills. He was practically in ace in a single battle, and he had barely taken damage to his shields. He almost felt bad for the ease in which he tore into the enemy squadron, stripping shields and slicing through hull plating like they weren't even there. All three Arwings in the fight had done surprisingly well so far; even the inexperienced lynx had managed to score a kill or two, if the information Falco gathered from his HUD was correct. He still didn't like the idea of her flying not only beside the Star Fox team, but in one of their fighters, but at least she was pulling a bit of weight.

He scanned his radar. The number of green and red dots had roughly evened out since his team's arrival, reduced to roughly half a dozen on either side. And it wasn't only the Star Fox fighters that were scoring kill streaks, though they had contributed greatly. Upon the mercenaries' arrival, the Cornerian's morale had skyrocketed, and they pushed their beaten, battered ships to the limit. Falco couldn't help but admire them for that; most of the remaining CDF craft could've been destroyed by a single, well-placed volley, but they pushed on, taking risks they probably shouldn't have to try to emerge from the battle alive.

A warning siren blared to life and cut through the crashing soundtrack. The avian instinctively kicked his Arwing's foot peddle and rolled to the side without a moment's hesitation. Angry jets of projectile vapor soared past him as he did, and he realized he had accidently drifted too close to the pair of corvettes that still plagued the Cornerians. Falco cursed and goosed his thrusters, boosting away from danger and allowing himself time to take stock of the situation.

Bill did it for him.

"Fox, you guys gotta take down those 'vettes!" the hound shouted, "We can't outrun them and they're tearing us apart!"

"We're on it Bill," Falco's vulpine wingmate responded, "Retreat towards the way you guys came, into the cloud. Falco, Miyu; you guys are on me."

"Gotcha," Falco responded, gently angling towards Fox's Arwing and again engaging his boosters, beating out the lynx's similar verbal reply by a second or two.

"We can't retreat," Bill exclaimed again in desperation, "There's still too many fighters to run. If we take our guns off 'em for a second they'll turn on us."

"Do your best," Fox called, his facial expression twisting in a mix between determination and worry, the latter an emotion Falco could rarely remember seeing in his friend during a dogfight.

The avian's Arwing's powerful engines brought him to Fox's wing with remarkable speed, and soon thereafter the wedge of three blue and white fighters had formed up tight. An unspoken word passed between himself and the vulpine he flew beside, and Falco coolly flipped a tab on his joystick, followed immediately by a _whirring _noise from the hull beneath him. Switching to dual release, the avian smiled as the high-yield warheads contained within his fighter armed themselves. All this had taken place even as Fox was giving the command to do the same to Miyu.

It was Falco's firm belief that no battle was complete without oversized explosions.

* * *

Ugh. So, I split my original next chapter into this and the next one, so I should have the second half up shortly. Still…that took far too long to update.

Feuerstoss: Thank you for the all the kind words Feuerstoss! I do try to put a lot of effort into the space battles, and I'm happy to hear that you like them so much (though I'll have to respectfully disagree with you on their level of quality being publish-worthy; I've still got miles of improvements to make).

RedBay: Of course; it's the least I could do for a friend, right? Thank you for the critiques on this past chapter too; I tried to shorten up the sentences in this one. Make them a bit punchier. Quick. Hm…and maybe I could do something with Calloway still…I'll think about that.

Stinger: Heheh, I gotta say, that review made me smile. Thanks bro; I know it's a good two months too late, but I hope you had a good new year. By the by, I've got a special request for you. Expect a PM shortly…

Kavi: Well thanks for the kind words Kav! And thanks just as much for the critiques. Of the three you made, I've spent a lot of time reviewing this chapter and correcting instances of the first two. Instances of the third were a bit trickier to ferret out; as anyone whose written anything knows, something that makes perfect sense to the author can be terribly convoluted to the reader. But again thank you; you and Stinger tend to give very precise, clear reviews, and I really appreciate them.

Dark Vengeance: Thanks DV! I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying my story.

As always, reviews are entirely optional but greatly appreciated. Doesn't have to be huge; just a sentence or two, either positive or negative, really means a lot. Even a few words would suffice. Hell, open the review window and bash your head off the keyboard (gf;hdfkdj;iqosf). It all helps.

Or, ya know…don't. No pressure to at all.


	14. Chapter 14: Frost

**XIV: **_Frost_

The fierce, all-encompassing yellow of Sector Z grew thinner and fainter until it gave way to open space, disappearing behind the amassed Cornerian fleet.

A tangle of engine trails and glowing exhaust followed the battered fleet, creating a forest of neon colors when viewed from above. Massive Battleships, nimble Corvettes, and every class of vessel in between populated the cloud of ships, arranged tightly in planned formations. The majority of the assembled craft were mostly intact, sporting the occasional metallic crater or stunted wing from the conflict an hour before. And of those not quite whole, only a handful required the assistance of another to keep up with the fleet.

"_Overall, not a bad outcome,"_ Commander Bishop thought to himself as he reviewed the status reports of the Cornerian Seventh Fleet's constituents.

As was the case in most major fleet engagements when no valuable planets or stations were in consideration, there was really very little lost or gained. They had damaged and crippled several capital ships, and even managed to bag a pair of Bauker's destroyers as well as a few of their smaller escorts. Given that the Cornerians' own losses amounted only to a pair of Corvettes, it was an easy claim to victory.

Which just left the special case of Captain Hartford's _Broadsword._

Bishop leaned back in the chair in his private quarters and sighed, folding his arms and reaching up with one hand to rub his temples; that whole situation was a shame, to say the least.

After he had given Hartford clearance to pursue the escaping enemy vessels, there had been no word from the _Broadsword, _or from the captured frigate _Hammerhead _he had sent along with the canine ship captain. During the battle, it wasn't anything Bishop thought too much of; after all, the gases of the Lylat System's three "Sectors" were infamous for disrupting communications in ways nobody could predict. But even after the last salvo had been fired, Fleet Admiral Gage had refused to send a scout team after Hartford.

Apparently, one of the scouts already deployed around the battlespace had picked up a massive energy spike somewhere out in the depths of Sector Z, one consistent with the detonation of a capital-class vessel. There was no evidence that it was the death throes of the _Broadsword, _but it seemed to be enough for Gage to call off any search attempt. Hartford's ship was chalked up as Missing In Action, and not much more was said.

"_Which is too bad," _Bishop admitted to himself, turning his gaze down to the bridge crew beneath his command post, _"Hartford was a good guy."_

But, if Gage said that Wing Commander Rashik had gotten nosy and stumbled upon the plan, he had to be dealt with. That much was certain. Captain Hartford just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time; Rashik's fighter squadron had been randomly assigned to his _Broadsword_, and it had to be sacrificed. Losing a full-sized cruiser was worth it to keep the plot intact; Rashik had enough rank and respect to be taken seriously if he had a chance to report to the Cornerian High Command.

Bishop shrugged and turned his eyes back towards the fleet readout projected on his private viewing screen.

"_Gage had better come through with this…"_

_

* * *

  
_

"Falco, Miyu; hold your fire until my signal," Fox's voice echoed over the communications channel, "I'm not sure just how effective these warheads are going to be, so we should probably launch them in salvo."

"Roger that McCloud," Miyu replied, not even bothering to glance down at the portrait of Fox on her HUD. Other than her words, silent acknowledgment reigned over the channel as the trio of angular fighter craft soared towards their prey, leaving the swarm of friendly Cornerian and hostile enemy fighters behind.

Fox's eyes narrowed as the targeting crosshairs on his HUD began blinking red, indicating his flight computer's analyzing of the keel-shaped enemy corvette. He urged the system on, begging it to work faster as the distance between him and his target rapidly fell, bringing him and his team closer and closer to the range of those deadly turrets. The fur on his trigger finger, standing on end, almost seemed to reach for the trigger of the joystick he gripped so tight, yearning to depress it and release the Arwing's deadly warheads.

But he resisted the instinctual aversion to flying into danger a little longer. Instinct was instinct for a reason, and convincing it to stand down took a good deal of courage and fortitude. It was a skill pilots had to be taught, and a difficult one at that. Delaying the flinch reflex. Putting off running away. Just long enough to get into range…

"Now!" he screamed, squeezing the trigger the instant his targeting crosshairs beeped a solid tone. He felt the metallic _clunk _as his missiles emerged from their launch tubes, streaking forth with computerized determination. Four more joined his pair from either side of him, two each from his wingmates.

Before the missiles could even cross half the distance though, the enemy corvette opened fire on the Arwings, its solid projectiles and their vapor trails leaping across space like bolts of smoky lightening. Fox couldn't help but wince when they did, his eyes acting on millennia of natural programming to shy away from the sudden impending danger. Only his life's training as a combat pilot prevented his body from showing further signs of fear or duress.

"I'm hit!" Falco yelped, his portrait dipping into static briefly before clearing again.

Even as Fox felt his missile tubes rearming, he glanced over at the avian's Arwing and saw immediately that the right wing had been sheared off by the corvette's projectile. The vulpine gritted his teeth and bored his sights into the larger enemy vessel. Falco was a sitting duck without the second wing, and Fox wasn't about to risk that life over his suicidal charge. But if they pulled out of the run too soon...

"Fire again, then break," he commanded, "We're getting too close."

As if to emphasize his point, the Arwings' second salvo was greeted with another grouping of return shots from the corvette. One bullet nicked Fox's shields, which held just long enough to ricochet the projectile before falling for a moment to prevent an overload under the pure velocity of the slug.

As he ordered, so did his wingmen obey, and the Arwings to either side of the mercenary commander broke and boosted away. But Fox didn't join them; instead, he boosted forward, chasing his own warheads towards the corvette. He barrel-rolled to the left just in time to dodge another shot from one of the enemy's turrets, and pressed on, not completely unfazed.

"_Trust your instincts."_

Peppy's words sounded through Fox's head like the last vestiges of an echo, and he took them to heart. There was something about the situation that seemed a little off. Call it a hunch, but Fox just couldn't shake the funny feeling he was getting, and the vulpine had learned long ago to trust the gut notions he often got in the heat of battle. He didn't care to count the number of times where those tiny suspicions had saved his life, and they had all started the same way this hunch was now.

The first salvo of missiles struck home, resulting in a stunning, rapid, six-part explosion. The protective bubble of energy that surrounded the corvette flashed visibly red for an instant before collapsing in on itself, dissipating and overloading the generators. The protective measures had done their part, but the shields were no longer active, apparently leaving the corvette completely vulnerable to the second wave of warheads. They were closing fast, and the ship's demise was certain.

Fox tilted his head to the side inquisitively, tightly gripping the joystick while simultaneously rerouting every spare system's power to the Arwing's forward shield array. "_Maybe…maybe the feeling was nothing after all…"_

A warning light flashed on his HUD, highlighting the rapidly growing corvette in red brackets. The number accompanying it, the numeral representation of the target's overall shield strength, was rapidly climbing back from zero. Fox cursed aloud, suddenly realizing the "doomed" vessel he was approaching was suddenly extremely viable once more. The second salvo of missiles would merely disable the newly redeployed shields again, leaving the corvette intact and fully capable of reaking havoc on the retreating mercenaries.

"Shit."

"Fox, that thing's got backup shield generators!" Falco called, his portrait showing obvious signs of confusion and hints of concern, "What the hell are you doing?!"

The vulpine ignored him and pressed on, feeling the mechanical retort of his missile launchers reloading. Quickly calculating that the corvette had one more shot at him before he flew past, but also realizing the feeble amount of protection his shields afforded his Arwing wasn't nearly enough to stand up to a single shot, Fox froze up.

He didn't want to, and didn't intend to, but the mercenary did. He froze up. The same instinct that told him to follow the second salvo of missiles in told him to fly straight towards the corvette, a tactical blunder that would cost him his life.

"Pull up!" Miyu shouted from somewhere far away.

The familiar vapor trails appeared and immediately covered the short distance to the Arwing…passing above, below, and to either side of it.

A second, six-part explosion nearly blinded the stunned fox as he registered the fact that he was still alive. The detonation of the second set of missiles burst the protective shield around the corvette once more, exposing it to whatever destructive force the Arwing pilot could muster in the split second it took to tear past the larger vessel.

It wouldn't be until later that Fox realized exactly how he was still alive. The gunners of the corvette must've guessed his attack pattern, and realized that they had only one shot left to take down the Arwing, and so deiced to cover every possible direction it could dodge to. No matter which way Fox decided to move, he would be gutted through by a heavy slug. Only, he didn't dodge. He just maintained a straight course and flew through the safe space between the set of deadly shots.

All that mattered at the moment though was that he was still with the living. Squeezing the trigger once more, he deployed his Arwing's final pair of missiles, goosing the afterburners as soon as he had and skimming past the enemy warship. The corvette's thin physical armor didn't stand a chance. Before it could get another set of shields up and running, Fox's last pair of warheads struck home, drilling into the smooth, exposed skin of the vessel several meters before exploding with terrible force.

Without sufficient gas density to carry the sound and shockwave of the detonation though, it didn't immediately appear to be a critical hit. Not until the vessel began shaking itself apart. The payload of the heavy ordinance had been delivered well inside the corvette, the explosion taking a second to ravage the soft insides of the ship before venting itself into space and making itself known. The missile literally gutted the vessel from the inside out.

With one final blast from within, the enemy corvette was no more, torn asunder by the incredible forces at work.

Fox exhaled a breath he wasn't aware he was holding, letting his lungs deflate slowly and steadily.

"_That was close."_

_"_God-_dammit _Fox!" Falco yelled as soon as he recovered from the shock of his friend's death-wish maneuver, "When are you gonna teach me how to pull this kind of shit?"

_

* * *

  
_

It wasn't a moment after Bill's targeting computer registered the destruction of an enemy corvette that the proximity alarm blared to life.

"What?!" he exclaimed in surprise, glancing down at the radar and noticing that a large red dot had snuck into firing range. Without even thinking about it, he had just answered the question as to where the second corvette had run off to.

Right in front of him.

With the blue gases of Sector X to his right, and the empty space of the null river to his left, Bill could only focus on the grey vessel floating dead center in his cockpit's field of vision. It hung there menacingly, distant enough to appear harmless, but close enough for a pilot to realize just how wrong that assumption was. Somehow, the small cloud of mixed fighters that buzzed around the hound didn't seem to matter so much anymore.

A Cornerian fighter from that cloud flew across the hound's vision in pursuit of one of the raiders, apparently unaware of the corvette's proximity. The pilot couldn't have known how quickly the mistake would cost him. A pair of heavy metallic slugs crashed through the unlucky pilot's canopy at almost the exact moment he came between Bill and the corvette, shattering the clear material like the most brittle of glass and utterly annihilating the entire middle portion of the fighter.

Out of instinct, Bill kicked his own CDF fighter up on its wing in preparation to swing away from the speeding corvette, but just as he did, a bright stream of golden light caught his eye.

Bursting forth from the wall of Sector X, several tremendous bolts of blond energy speared the rapidly approaching raider vessel, dissipating its powerful shield array in the opening salvo. The force of the impacts was so much that it pushed the corvette off course, and Bill was able to see the black scorch marks that had been seared into the metallic grey armor plating on the side. The marks were mere burns of proximity; the spontaneous show of force from the depths of Sector X hadn't even scored a direct hit yet.

The second burst of shots wasn't as forgiving.

The shafts of destructive energy sought their target with vengeance, able to showcase their true destructive potential now that the corvette's shields were down. Skewering the vessel through and through, they punched holes directly from one side to the other, leaving gaping punctures rimmed with armor plating, peeled back like fruit, in their wake. Atmosphere and debris that wasn't immediately vaporized emerged from within shunted into the cold vacuum of space in a quickly dissipating cloud. The destruction was complete and total, decimating the corvette before it could even hope to maneuver or return fire.

Bill sat still in his fighter, stunned by the mysterious show of force he had just witnessed. There had been no explosion, but it clearly wasn't needed; the second corvette floated lifeless in the void, speared completely through in several places. There was no chance that the vessel would ever fight again, much less pose any current threat.

"Sarge, what _was _that?!" one of the few remained Cornerian pilots asked in awe over the communications system, asking the question the hound was thinking to himself. But before he could offer the cadet a response, the query was answered for him.

Emerging from the cloud of vapor like an ancient monster cresting to the surface from the deep waters of a sea, a sleek, angled ship burst through into the null river. The 'head' of the vessel jutted forward on a short neck, giving the monster theory more credence. Two pairs of wings grew from the main fuselage, one angling slightly upward and the other slightly down, with each arm tipped by a flashing running light. A large hanger was slung underneath the body like the belly of the beast, sporting a pair of almost disproportionately large laser cannons in addition to the gaping docking bay entrance.

But the emblem Bill was searching for, the symbol he immediately recognized, was located on the tail fin of the vessel, just above the massive triple bank of thrusters. His facial expression shifted from its confused state to one of relief and silent gratitude as he made out the shape of a winged vulpine captured in midstep, the crimson insignia of the Star Fox team.

"Peppy!" Falco's voice called over the communications channel to the newcomer of the battle, "So good of you to join us!"

"Better late than never," Peppy's matter of fact tone responded a moment later, "But quit yer blabbering; we've still got a bit of a mess to clean up."

Bill nodded to himself, ready to finally put an end to these raiders. He shoved away all thoughts of just how much destruction his squadron had suffered in the fray, knowing they would only distract him from had suddenly become a mop-up battle. Even if he were the only surviving Cornerian pilot, with the entire strength of the Star Fox team arrayed against the handful of remaining enemy fighters, the hound found it unlikely the battle would be lost. Mourning could wait.

He glanced down at his HUD radar, searching for red dots to pursue, when he noticed to his immense surprise, that there were none. All he saw were the few green icons indicating the Star Fox team and other members of Gamma Squadron, clumped closely together. The enemies appeared to have disappeared entirely.

"Sir, the raiders are making a break for it," Sergeant Haggerty's portrait observed, cementing the prospect.

Bill responded by adjusting the range of his radar, zooming out until he could see the distant group of red dots putting more and more distance between them and his own fighters. But even as he noted this, his expression became one of worry as he saw Rhena's face in the portrait on his HUD.

Her hair had been mussed and shaken out of place, strands and individual braids hanging haphazardly over her shoulders and flightsuit. The dark green color scheme of the jumpsuit and naturally dark fur of the wolf pilot contrasted sharply with the fiery red and orange tresses of her stray hair, lending her an unreal appearance, with her disheveled state only adding to the slightly exotic look the combat had produced for her.

Underneath it all, Bill still saw part of the cool determination and efficiency of Rhena's combat attitude he had always known. Even so though, the expression she wore was infected with a stunned disbelief of what had just happened. Seeing this was what worried the hound; Rhena Haggerty simply didn't show weakness. She was the one most cadets looked to for a level, if somewhat frank head, no matter the circumstances. To see her like this was…not right.

"Roger that Flight Sergeant, do not pursue," he commanded, angling his fighter for where the Cornerian fighters were regrouping around the cargo transports they had been assigned to protect. The Cornerian hound noticed with a questioning look that the freighters had emerged from the skirmish almost completely unscathed. "Regroup with the Blue Arrow transports and report in by flight."

Several moments of silence followed his command, causing him to assume something had happened with the communication equipment.

"I repeat, Gamma Squadron, first flight, report in."

Another moment of empty static filled Bill's cockpit before the full realization of what it meant struck him. In that same moment, a cadet's voice filled the com waves, dread polluting her voice like smog.

"S-sir…" she began, unsure and a little scared. The waver in her voice betrayed the presence of a frightened girl than a rigorously trained pilot; it was as though she knew a secret and was being forced to share it, "They're all gone. E-every one of them. …Dead."

Bill looked at the squadron readout, a list of digitally projected numbers from one to twelve running along the bottom of his HUD. Just as the Cornerian cadet had noted, numbers one through four, amongst others, were all dark and unlit. The wind left his lungs like someone had delivered a haymaker to his gut. Seconds of silence ticked by like minutes, inching along in an eternity of confirmation for something Bill simply didn't want to believe. Something he _couldn't _believe. But apparently something he had to. There was no escaping it; the soundlessness was defeaning.

"Second flight?" he asked rather than commanded, realizing he had to start off the count.

More silence, though this gap not as long before it was broken by the cadet who had spoken only a minute ago.

"Gamma Eight," she said, clearly unable to muster more at the moment.

"Gamma Nine," Rhena continued, her business-like voice on the verge of choking with emotion.

"Gamma Twelve…," a male cadet finished, his voice slowly dying off as he realized the full immensity of what his response had meant.

A staggering hush fell over the null river as all those within finally had a chance to take stock of their situation.

"...Four?" Bill wondered aloud in a daze, self-induced in his mind's attempt to cope with the loss of two-thirds of his squadron.

Only a fool signs up for the military and expects to never be touched by death's cold hand in one way or another. Or so Bill heard. But he normally liked the phrase, because it was an unfortunate truth of combat, and he was no stranger to death. Even under his own command, he had lost a few pilots; pilots who had, as he so often insisted, forfeited themselves due to a tactical blunder on the hound's own part. It was a topic for debate, but he was familiar with the idea of friendly casualties.

But not like this. Not this many.

Eight lives had been snuffed out in a matter of a half-four. _"Eight," _Bill repeated to himself, regaining the presence of mind to not say it out loud. Every one of the lost an acquaintance, and some, like Lieutenant Calloway, friends. He had eaten in the mess hall with them. He had given some personal one-on-one mentoring in a particularly difficult simulation. Their false hopes of ability and teamwork were instilled in them by none other than himself.

And now they were gone.

"…Sir?" the female Cornerian cadet inquired, still shaken but driven to ask, "What are your orders?"

Bill was glad he had disabled the communications camera in his fighter, though he was sure anyone nearby could clearly see him staring listlessly off into space.

"Form up, Gamma Squadron," Rhena responded for him, emotion still soaking her voice in an eerily unusual way, "We continue on."

* * *

So, as of publishing this chapter, I'm finally starting to get an idea of what sort of overarching plotline I want to have. I know up until now I've been kinda meandering through a story as far as plot goes, but from now on, I'll try to focus more on that aspect.

Sir Raphael: Thank you for the kind words, and thank you even more for pointing out the lack of plot movement. Your review got me thinking about the rest of the story, so I wanted to say I appreciate it. Glad you're enjoying the story :)

Kavi: Thanks Kavi! As always, I appreciate the fact that you always spot something for me to improve upon.

RedBay: Haha, I'm glad you picked up on that line from Star Fox 64. And no worries; I think I've come up with a good solution as to what you brought up about Calloway. Thanks for the review, mate!

AndrossKenobi: Thanks man; I'm glad you're enjoying the story!


	15. Chapter 15: Yohan

**XV****: **_Yohan_

The door to the _Great Fox_'s hanger slid open with a faint _swish_, barely within audible range.

Yet that mere whisper of pneumatic air was the most pronounced racket imaginable in a room thick with silence.

Peppy Hare stepped through the threshold, sensing the denseness of the atmosphere in the docking bay almost immediately. He bit back words of greeting, coming to the conclusion that the hush occupying the cavernous room was best left undisturbed. Instead, he simply stood in the doorway, settling with merely observing what he could for awhile.

The hanger was playing host to a number of foreign craft. Besides Slippy's Arwing off in the corner, the rest of the floor space was almost consumed by a quartet of thin, agile Cornerian Defense Force fighters, all showing very visible signs of injury and damage. Their pilots, still dressed in their dark green flightsuits, had congregated at the nose of their commander's ship, some sitting, some standing; all completely lost in their own respective worlds of thought.

Peppy couldn't help but experience a sense of deep remorse at the sight of the pilots and their butchered vessels beside each other. He could see the scorched hulls and boiled paint of the fighters in the faces of those that operated them. And in return the pilots' dull expressions, their quiet acceptance of the burden of being alive when so many others perished, was reflected on their mechanical mounts.

It was a strange sort of relationship few understood, but it was plain as day to a veteran of the piloting profession. And it saddened him.

Peppy wanted to say something to help comfort the remaining pilots of Gamma Squadron, but in the end, what sentiments could he possibly voice? There was nothing one could say to those who just watched eight of their friends, their extended family, die. The fact that none of the four pilots turned towards the hare when he entered the hanger further confirmed that there was nothing he could, or should, utter.

So, in the end, he only said what he had ultimately come in to say.

"We'll be at Yohan in about ten minutes," he said in a quiet voice, careful not to raise it anymore than he had to.

Peppy left the hanger as it was when he had entered it; thick with silence.

* * *

Yohan Depot was a prime example of a standard Cornerian Navy Starbase. No extras, no frills; nothing save the bare, efficient essentials. That much was plainly visible from space.

The blinding gases of Sector X once again parted, this time opening to reveal a small bubble of clear space deep within the cloud. Sitting dead center in the open pocket was the circular Cornerian structure, surrounded by a field of dozens of stationary shipping containers and free floating storage crates. All around the station, small, one-man tugs buzzed and flitted about like so many insects around a flower, bringing select shipments in to the base from the vacuum and placing other massive parcels back into the endless yard storage.

Baring roughly the shape of an oversized bottle cap, Yohan was not at all something to look at and admire. Given its backwater purpose though, this fact made sense.

It was a largely modular-looking, two-tiered station, which was sadly where any list of compliments one could muster about it would end. Even on its very first day of operation however many years ago, Cornerian High Command clearly spared every cost. The ubiquitous shade of Cornerian green paint hadn't been retouched in quite some time, and the rest of the exterior matched the color's state of disrepair. Rust stains dotted the hull plating, the seams of which were beginning to bulge and curl from lack of maintenance.

In all honesty though, none of it mattered to Falco as he led the flight of four Blue Arrow transports towards the station. He was just happy to see the end of their journey.

Ever since the Star Fox team had taken point on the escort run, allowing the remnants of Gamma Squadron some much needed recuperation in the _Great Fox_'s hanger, he had been wrestling with his Arwing. The utter lack of a wing and its accompanying maneuvering thrusters on one side of the fighter, a scar from the skirmish not long enough ago, caused his ship to constantly pull to that side, requiring continuous correction. In his heart, he was happy to remain out on escort duty so that the other pilots could recover, but it didn't stop the task of making his unbalanced fighter fly straight from being annoying as hell.

That's why he breathed a sigh of relief when he heard Yohan Depot's communications officer making contact with the lead Blue Arrow transport on the com.

Falco didn't hear much of the initial conversation though, as a transmission from Peppy cut off the opening words of the communications officer.

"Listen up guys," the hare said, gripping his chin and deep in thought, "I want you to dock with the _Great Fox_ before we land at Yohan. Their dockmaster just let me know that they're expecting a fairly big convoy soon, so they need all the hanger space they can afford."

A moment of silence passed.

"…Are you serious?" Falco couldn't help but quip, cocking his head to the side, "There's nobody here. How much space do they need?"

"It didn't make much sense to me, either," Peppy agreed, holding his hands up to show he couldn't do anything about it. He didn't say anything more though, inviting more of the open dialogue.

"Whatever," Fox shrugged, "It's the last little hoop of theirs to jump through. Let's just get the paycheck and get back home."

"Eh," Miyu began, catching everyone off guard by adding to a conversation for the first time during the mission, "I have a funny feeling about this."

Going from the _Great Fox_'s hanger to the hallway immediately adjacent to it didn't do anything to lift the melancholy air that hung around the Cornerian pilots. If anything, it was concentrated by the tighter confines, forced upon them since the mercenary pilots were landing in the depressurized docking bay.

Nothing had yet been said between the quartet, though this was mainly due to their Sergeant's steadfast refusal to initiate any conversation. Instead of trying to lift the mood with his usually light-hearted nature, Bill Grey continued to stare off silently into some imaginary point in space; usually a point near his combat boots. The hound leaned against the corridor wall, arms folded loosely. His hair was still the same mussed mess as it had been when he removed his flight helmet, unkempt and hanging over his brow, covering his eyes.

If it had been under virtually any other circumstances, the pair of cadets would've been cracking jokes at this. However, given the recent occurrence…

"Sir, there was nothing you could've…" the female cadet began finally, standing opposite her Sergeant in much the same pose. It had taken a good deal of time to work up the nerve to break the silence, not to mention to defeat her own disbelief and sorrow at losing so many friends and squadmates. The young coyote was relatively new to Gamma Squadron, and though on the quiet side, she had just begun to get acclimated in her new social surroundings.

The other female of the group shot her a harsh glare, a not-so-subtle gesture to stop talking. The cadet halted immediately and broke eye contact with the wolf who was staring her down, almost as if ashamed.

Rhena Haggerty had been somewhat protective of her superior while he was in such an emotional slump, essentially speaking for him since the battle ended not so long ago. She felt like it was only the right thing to do as the second-in-command. But without even realizing it, there was another source of the shielding behavior. The wolf was genuinely worried about him.

Bill was never like this. Gamma Squadron had lost pilots before, and Bill had shown quiet solace before, but never like this.

A _boom_ shuddered through the _Great Fox _from the large, space-side hanger doors closing shut.

The second male, and final member, of the quartet watched the altercation with apprehension from his position crouching against the corridor wall, but said nothing. He didn't have the greatest respect for Sergeant Haggerty, and was usually the first to lead the complaining and jeering about her in the cadets' barracks back at the base. But in this case, the sandy-furred vulpine couldn't help but agree with her intention. There was nothing that could be said to help Bill through this sort of situation. He would have to come out of whatever funk he was in by himself. Hopefully by the time the mission was through.

The light above the door leading back into the docking bay flipped from red to green, lifting the automatic safety lock. Only moments later, the captain of the Star Fox pilots strode through, dressed in his silver flight vest and forest green trousers. The Cornerian pilots all turned towards the new arrival to the hallway, but none of them straightened or altered their body language in any welcoming manner.

The mercenary's leader, a fox with rusty orange fur and a business-like demeanor, didn't seem to mind. He stopped short of the Cornerians at what seemed like a respectful distance, clearing his throat.

"Bill," he said, the fox's use of the Sergeant's first name betraying his friendship with the hound, "Peppy got word from the Blue Arrow captain that he wants to meet with all of the pilots upon landing. He said he wants to issue his condolences in person."

Bill nodded slowly, breaking eye contact and stating a half whispered, "Alright."

The mercenary nodded in return, sensitive of the heavy air surrounding the Cornerians and leaving the conversation at what had already been spoken, adding only his own, "Alright."

It appeared as though the fox wanted to say something more, but he thought better of it and bit his lip, holding the words back. Instead, the vulpine turned on his heel and headed back towards the hanger, welcomed by a pair of bickering pilots as soon as he walked back through the door.

* * *

"All I'm saying is that you're lucky I chose your captain to go up against back in Meteos. Otherwise, I would be back with those smugglers making decent pay, and you'd be in a coffin somewhere. That's all."

"And you really don't see where saying something like that could piss me off?"

"…No. I really don't."

"…Unbelievable."

"Falco, don't act surprised. She's just trying to hide how impressed she is after seeing us in action," Fox said with a hint of swagger, though not as much as he wanted to show. Seeing how much Bill was affected by the outcome of the battle had weighed his attitude down a fair amount.

"Bull…_shit_," Miyu stated, not even trying to hide it.

Falco just smirked and crossed his arms, mentally calling the argument a win in his favor with Fox's intervention.

"Just…hold it together for a few more hours, alright guys?" Fox asked them, "Then we'll be paid, _you'll_ get dropped off at whatever Freeport you like Miyu, and everyone'll be happy."

"I_ am_ still getting paid, right?" Miyu quipped, bracing her hips with a cynical swish and putting a fist against her right side.

Fox sighed, shaking his head and resisting the urge to rub his temples, "Yes, yes you are Miyu. We'll keep our word as long as you keep yours. By the end of today you'll have your credits, we'll have ours, and we'll both be out of this situation for good."

"Good," Falco and Miyu both muttered under their breaths, glaring daggers at each other as soon as they realized what the other had said.

A sudden silence overtook the hanger as the _Great Fox's_ primary engines cut out, removing the background _thum _that was usually omni-present throughout the ship. While disorienting at first, Fox knew all it meant was that the ship was now coasting into Yohan Depot's primary hanger under maneuvering power. A shudder ran through the vessel as it entered the pressurized docking bay, passing through the invisible magnetic barrier and confirming the vulpine's thoughts.

And even as the _thud_ of landing struts touching down followed the shudder, Falco and Miyu never broke their stare-down.

"Now that's dedication right there_,_" Fox admitted.

The final measure of the _Great Fox's_ landing symphony clanked and whooshed through the smaller hanger as its large forward doors parted, telescoping and retracting towards their respective sides. The slightly fresher recycled air of the Depot rushed through the initially slim opening, accompanying the straining and grinding of gears and motors pulling back the heavy walls.

Falco and Miyu finally broke their glare and began making their way across the metal deck as the hanger doors creaked to a halt halfway open, allowing plenty of space for the pilots to pass through. The desire to 'get it over with' was palpable in the air.

A much fainter _swish _caught Fox's attention and he turned around to catch the quartet of Cornerian pilots threading through the small hallway door towards him. They walked with the discipline of military personnel, through there was a noticeable weariness to their step, especially in the gait of their commander. Even so, Fox decided that they were just as eager to get the endgame of the assignment over with as his own troupe was.

Seeing his old friend so distant and lost in thought troubled the vulpine, but he knew there was really nothing he could do about it. As a mercenary, he had never been saddled with the responsibility or pressure military leaders suffered on a daily basis. But unlike so many of his counterparts, he cared tremendously about his wingmen. And there had been far too many close calls to not have felt a good deal of fear of losing someone he valued so much.

So while he had no personal experience with the sort of situation Bill found himself in now, Fox could empathize. And he knew that if he was thrown into a similar scenario, he wouldn't want people badgering him about how 'everything would be okay,' and the like. He would want to be left alone for awhile.

The mercenary captain weaved his way through the _Great Fox's _hanger, now cluttered with both CDF and Arwing fighters, and rejoined everyone else at the threshold to Yohan's cavernous docking bay beyond.

Not thirty meters away, the clutch of Blue Arrow transports were lined up like rungs of a ladder on the metal deck, the bulkheads that made up their sides open and extended upwards. Dozens of dock hands were milling about the open freighters, unloading them with the help of hover lifts and service robots. The heavy automatons clanked up and down the unloading ramps in enough numbers to add a kinetic background noise to the scene.

Inside the transports were stacks upon stacks of rectangular boxes, roughly the size of and baring the dimensions of caskets. Unlike their morbid dopplegangers though, these containers bore the heavy metal casings and tracking numbers of mundane cargo. They were being removed and restacked a short distance away from the freighters, no doubt for organization and sorting once the unloading job was complete.

"I hope whatever they were shipping was worth it," Falco said aloud to nobody in particular, observing the busy dockworkers from the edge of the ramp.

"They said it was just spare parts and munitions," Rhena answered from behind with an empty voice, "Yohan's a dumping ground for old equipment."

"You're kidding me," Fox finished, suppressing the urge to whistle low. _"All that loss of life for a scrap run? That just can't be…"_

A small envoy of important looking military personnel making their way over to the group atop the _Great Fox's_ gangway caught their attention. The formal uniform and officer's cap of the leopard heading the group of uniformed men stood out in stark contrast to the rough-looking dock crew buzzing around the Blue Arrow transports. In fact, the officer and his followers were wearing the only uniforms in the entire docking bay; the work crew seemed to be dressed in whatever they pleased for the day.

Fox caught the Cornerian pilots exchanging silent glances, though what they were conveying was lost on the mercenary. Confusion? Disapointment? None of them changed their posture any, leading him to believe it wasn't anything too important. Nothing to worry about in any case.

"Flight Sergeant Grey," the uniformed leopard offered Bill as he and his cadre stopped at the bottom of the _Great Fox_'s gangway. "I am Major Wilkins. Will you and your squadron please follow me? I'd like to discuss some details about the mission with you off the hanger floor."

Bill hesitated. This time, he looked directly at Fox, and the vulpine could see exactly what his friend was thinking. The Cornerian was suspicious about something.

"Flight Sergeant, I'm afraid I must insist," the Major continued, folding his hands behind the small of his back and puffing out his chest in a clear assertion of rank, "Lieutenant Calloway insisted you be given a message from him in private should he perish in combat.

* * *

Hm...not much to say here. I have the next chapter written, and I'm currently editing it. As always, if you guys can think of anything to say about the story thus far, I'd love to here it :)

Northern-Megas: Thanks! I'm glad you're enjoying the story :)

RedBay: I'm glad you mentioned Peppy's line; I've been trying to drop little bits here and there that relate back to Star Fox 64. Thanks for the review!


	16. Chapter 16: Vapor

**XVI****: **_Vapor_

Bill had to admit he was intrigued.

After being led through a few side corridors off the main hanger of Yohan Depot he, his fellow Gamma squadron pilots and the Star Fox pilots entered a small, circular conference room. There was a compact holographic projector in the middle of the space, about the size of a speaker's podium. Two rings of seats radiated outward from the projector, circled by railings and finally a pathway that led around the entire room.

The walls had a grimy, worn down feel to them, matching the palpable taste of rust that permeated the station. Bill could see the aged look throughout the conference room actually; it seemed like there hadn't been a briefing, meeting, or even so much as a living presence here in several years. In fact, the officer who led the group to the room left shortly after arriving, mentioning something about making sure they were even in the right room.

"_It wouldn't surprise me if we weren't," _he thought, leaning forward in his seat with his elbows on his knees. He pressed his lips into a thin line, _"Backwater places like this tend to forget the whole _being punctual _thing."_

But what Bill was more interested in was the promise this Major Wilkins had offered. There was definitely a healthy amount of skepticism hazing his thoughts; as dramatic and deserving of a holo-flick as the idea is, pilots just didn't leave personal memos in case of their untimely demise. At least not to friends or acquaintances.

"_I mean, we were friends and everything," _Bill reasoned with himself, propping his chin up on one hand as he stared thoughtfully at the floor, _"But we weren't _that _close."_

So what could it be?

In any case, Bill was satisfied to have something to take his mind off what had happened to his squadron.

The other pilots, meanwhile, were spread throughout the room.

The trio of Star Fox pilots sat relatively close together, directly across from the contemplative hound, separated from each other by a seat or two on either side.

Fox and Falco were sitting in the top row of seats, leaning forward in a manner matching Bill's and bracing their arms on their knees. Their attention was focused on that lynx that had flown with them. She was sitting in the lower row between the two males, twisting and looking back over her chair. One arm was slung neatly over the back of the seat, and she gestured with her other. It looked like she was trying to make a point of some sort, though she was whispering so Bill couldn't quite make out what it was she was saying. It seemed to agitate Falco a little.

Although it could've also been the fact that Major Wilkins had requested the pilots to check their side arms just off the docking bay. The lynx _had_ chided Falco's reluctance to hand over his pistol.

Bill made a mental note to ask his old friend about her; every time Fox considered hiring a new member to fill out his squad he always asked the hound first and tried to lure him out of military service. And every time, Bill politely declined. But the last time Fox had messaged him with a request was just before the Lylat War.

"_So where did she come from?"_

The spotted lynx appeared to have been in a fight recently. She moved fluidly and her posture betrayed no injuries, but bits of bandage and medical wrap poked out from her sleeves and the bottom of her shirt. If he could remember right, she had also seemed a little uneasy with the Arwing she was piloting during the skirmish…

The lynx broke eye contact with the other Star Fox pilots and glanced his way suddenly, catching Bill's eye before he had a chance to look away. Caught staring at her, he maintained his gaze just long enough to see the flash of annoyance her blue eyes shot his way.

"_She must be a new hire then, I guess_," he concluded as he casually looked away, casting his sight across the room towards the Cornerian Pilots.

The two females, Rhena and one of the cadets, were standing facing each other, engaged in the barest of conversations. Bill could tell that Rhena was in one of her 'leave-me-alone' moods again; the wolf had her back and one foot pressed against the wall, her arms crossed and a stoic expression etched on her facial features. She was clearly not amused by whatever the cadet was asking her.

The cascades of flame-colored hair hung loose and unkempt just above the small of Rhena's back, but they had noticeably lost luster. Bill's mind entertained him with a brief thought of it possibly being due to some emotional state, as if the tresses reflected her thoughts like some permanent mood ring. But the more mundane and slightly unattractive answer was that it was probably due to sweat messing with the hair dye.

Bill felt his own forehead and noticed how his own fur was slightly brackish thanks to some of the more tense moments back during the dogfight. And now that he thought about it, the whole room did have a faint, salty scent to it.

The cadet Rhena was talking to had been the newest addition to Gamma Squadron back when it was…well, Gamma Squadron, and not just the survivors. Probably due to this fact, she had been pretty quiet her first few weeks around the rest of the pilots at Castle Base. Bill thought for a moment and couldn't actually remember what her voice sounded like without the metallic filter of a CDF Fighter's communications system.

"_Linka Pyrokanzia…now there's an interesting story_," Bill thought as a sudden yawn caught him by surprise. His arms shot up in a deep stretch as he recalled reading over the coyote's dossier when she was first assigned to Gamma. If he remembered right, it was pretty impressive.

Before the hound's mental meanderings could wander further, however, the final member of the party caught his attention.

Cratz, the second cadet, was sleeping; or at least it appeared he was. The tan-furred fox was lounging back in his chair in the outer ring of seats, his head hanging back over the edge, exposing the short hairs of his neck. Everything about the vulpine expressed complete relaxation, and yet…

Bill whistled high but quiet, getting Rhena's, attention; she was only a few steps from the dozing fox. The wolf immediately glanced at the hound with a hard but respectfully questioning look, effectively ending her half-conversation with Linka.

Fox McCloud's head jerked to attention when he heard the whistle, but he quickly returned to passively listening to his wingmates bicker when he reasoned it wasn't for him. Still, he kept an eye on the Cornerian pilots.

The hound cocked his head towards the male cadet. There may not have been any high ranking officers present, and formalities could be slackened because of it, but this was still no time to be taking a nap. In fact, Bill couldn't think of any good time to take a nap while on duty. What the hell was Cratz thinking?

Rhena followed the direction of Bill's signal and got the implication immediately. She frowned and took a meaningful step towards the fox. Before she could pick one of the several methods she could think of to rudely awaken the cadet, Linka saw what was about to happen. Hoping to spare her friend from their superior's wrath, she stepped in front of Rhena and reached the fox first.

"Hey, Cratz; get up," she said, grabbing the fox's shoulder and giving it a gentle shake. She unsuccessfully tried to suppress a yawn and shook him again. "Cratz, c'mon man…wake…wake up…"

The air shimmered around her as she fell, like every muscle in her legs just simultaneously gave out on her.

Bill jumped to his feet when the coyote hit the ground, but before he could even yelp in surprise, Fox McCloud was shouting.

"Pick her up! G-get her away from him!" he commanded frantically, waving his arms as he too leapt up from his seat and jumped to help. Rhena's head snapped towards the speaker, giving Fox a clear view of the wave of tiredness that almost over came her.

"Hey check out the vent!" Falco added as Fox and Rhena dragged the comatose Linka away to safety.

Bill and Miyu followed the avian's pointing finger to an air duct high on the far wall of the conference room, just below the beginning of the domed, circular ceiling. It took a moment, but when the sterile fluorescent lights of the room caught grille just right, they saw it.

The gas was almost invisible as it poured from the vent, flowing like slow motion water down to the floor beneath it. Wisps curled up and disappeared from the stream as they were dispersed into the recycled air of the conference room. It flowed directly onto the unsuspecting Cornerian cadet sitting motionless beneath it.

"Heavy Gas!" Bill exclaimed, recognizing the characteristics of the clear substance immediately.

"Oh what the hell man?!" Falco cursed, joining the rest of the pilots on the top tier of the circular room, escaping the growing mist in the middle of the lower rings of seats, "I thought these guys were on our side!"

Miyu dashed to the door keypad, striking the 'open' key and receiving an angry chirp from the device in return.

"It's locked," she reported.

"Can we close off that vent?" Rhena asked, regaining her composure after putting some distance between herself and the source of the gas. She was still dragging the female cadet the long way around the circle walkway with Fox's help to where the rest of the group had assembled near the only door.

"No, don't go near it," Bill replied, his voice beginning to quicken, "Even a small, concentrated dose of it will knock you out cold; anymore than a full breath…" He glanced at Cratz.

"Shit."

Miyu was still at the keypad of the door, examining the palm-sized device with frantic fingertips.

A moment of silent panic swept the room as those within it came to terms with what was happening.

"_Shit!_" Falco cursed again, vocalizing the collective thoughts of the entire room.

"Well what now?" Rhena asked nobody in particular, dropping Linka roughly to the floor and shaking away the last affects of her brief encounter with the gas. She sounded frustrated.

"Get her off the floor!" Bill commanded, matching Rhena's glare, "The gas is heavier than air; it'll pool on the ground."

Miyu continued to probe the door pad for a few more moments before balling her fist and delivering a well-measured thump to the case, cracking it.

Falco guided Rhena aside when she hesitated a moment, gently but firmly pushing the wolf away from Linka and hoisting the unconscious cadet up over his shoulder. Her slight build made it easy for the avian. Rhena's cheeks flushed and she whipped back towards Falco, about to rebuke the mercenary when Miyu called out, getting her attention.

"Knife. Does anyone have a knife?" she asked, her voice, like everyone else's, peppered with anxiety.

Rhena's knee shot up, halting even with Falco's chest. The avian took a second to shift his burden before matching Rhena's glare with one of his own, refusing to react to her feint. A beat of silence passed before the wolf finally broke eye contact and pulled up the pant leg of the limb suspended in the air. A thin leather sheath was fastened around the dark fur of her shin, with a rough, used-looking handle jutting up from the top.

Rhena drew the blade, the length running halfway up her lower leg, and tossed it gently to the waiting lynx. Falco pursed his lips into a smirk despite his surroundings, amused by Rhena's attempt to intimidate.

Not expecting the sharp instrument to be lobbed at her, Miyu fumbled and the knife clattered to the floor. She snatched it up and turned back to the cracked door panel. But not before noticing a glaze of faint, white mist beginning to rise from the metallic ground.

The vapor continued to flow from the vent like a faucet.

"Hey Bill…why aren't we dead yet?" Fox asked casually, but not without growing alarm as Miyu wedged the knife between the door's access pad and the wall.

"Heavy Gas is heavy," the hound explained, loosening the fastenings of his flight suit so he could pull a thin sheet of scarf-like fabric from inside. He tied the ends around his head and let it pull tight over his muzzle, muffling his words to some degree, "It'll fall to the floor like water and pool there. We were exposed to light doses of it in basic training."

The gas began to concentrate, as if to illustrate his point, growing thicker until the group's ankles were completely obscured.

"So, what? We just _sit _here to die then?" Falco grunted, starting to list to one side as the weight on his shoulder grew gradually burdensome.

"Not if you could all just shut _up _a minute!" Miyu shouted from the door, catching everyone's attention. With a gasp of exertion she jammed the knife further and pressed it forward like a lever.

The composite touchpad on the door panel popped off and disappeared in the thick vapors below. By now the lower tiers of the room were solid white with gas; the silent, tan fox Cratz was shrouded to his neck. If anyone had taken a closer glance, they would've noticed the skin beneath his fur fading to a dirty, poisoned grey.

As was to be expected given the circumstances, nobody had yet stopped to wonder _who _was trying to kill them, and why.

"Do you know anything about control systems?" Rhena asked as she approached the lynx, verbally gesturing towards the open door panel.

"…No," Miyu replied as though giving up, turning towards the assembled pilots, "I was sorta hoping one of you did."

The gas was beginning to reach their knees.

"_Shit_!" Falco shouted, the weight on his back not hampering his ability to vocalize, "Where's that goddamn toad when you need 'im?!"

"Calm down," Rhena retorted, though it was obvious her frustration was rising.

Falco glowered at the wolf and responded with a string of curses, almost as if to spite her. His voice was loud and angry, matched only by Rhena's as they fell into a heated argument over nothing.

Fox quickly ran a hand through his hair, urging his brain on while the two bickered. He had something; he knew there was an answer there somewhere, but, as though shrouded by the very gas that was seeking to silence them, it refused to surface. He began to pace, not noticing his legs kicking up tiny wafts of gas as he moved.

Bill pushed Miyu's nervous and tentative hands aside as he bent at the waist and yanked out the electrical guts of the doorpad.

"Jeez, how did that all _fit _in there?" Miyu couldn't help but wonder aloud as she saw the tangle of wires in the hound's paws.

Thin rubber insulation of every color made up the mess, a hopeless muddle of wiring and the occasional circuit chip. A professional electrician wouldn't be able to make sense of the heap in the moments they had left, much less any of them.

Miyu visibly slouched. They were done for.

"I got it!" Fox sputtered out of nowhere, rushing to the door.

The white mist was waist high; there was no trace of Cratz whatsoever.

"Got what?" Bill exclaimed as he was shouldered aside by the vulpine.

"These doors are wired to open if there's an electrical surge or something, right? Safety codes and all that," Fox explained, not even waiting for Bill to nod yes, "So we _create a surge_! Gimme the knife."

Miyu surrendered it without hesitation. "You know how to short this thing?"

"Not quite," Fox admitted, picking a wire with dangerous-looking red insulation and cutting it with the blade. A shower of sparks burst from the split ends as they contacted the metal knife, eliciting a curse and causing the mercenary to drop the knife out of impulse.

The vapors were close to his elbows now. Miyu, the shortest of the remaining pilots, could feel herself beginning to tire. In a moment of panic she realized what it meant.

"Hurry," Falco urged, drawing out the syllables. His screaming at Rhena come to a halt as he shifted Linka's helpless body so her head was above the rising gas.

Fox picked a chip at random, pressing the exposed wires he cut to the silicon wafer. A wisp of black smoke accompanied a tiny _pop_ as the circuit overloaded.

Nothing happened.

The gas began to creep around his hands. Bill shoved another chip his way and Fox doused it with current, prompting another _pop_.

The lights died, plunging the room into complete darkness. Only the red exit lights remained, bathing their coffin in a harsh crimson glow.

Bill held his breath as he cut his fingers on the sharp side of another silicon chip.

* * *

Peppy cocked the shotgun, loading a shell into the breach. He strode down the hall with purpose.

Fox's communicator was unresponsive. Of course it was; the hare couldn't admit he was surprised by it.

He picked up his pace to a jog down the _Great Fox_'s hanger-access corridor, approaching the door that lead to the vessel's docking bay. Even as he neared, he could see hear the clear but impatient voices on the other side. They were hacking the doorpad.

Slapping the 'open' switch on the maintenance closet just short of the hanger door, the hare ducked inside and out of the hallway, turning off the automatic light that flipped on and taking a moment to breathe.

Peppy had seen the armed dock workers approaching the open _Great Fox_ from the bridge, through the surveillance cameras that dotted the ship's outer hull. Without so much as a beat of hesitation, he had snatched up his personal com unit and dashed out of the _Great Fox_'s command room as fast as his old bones could take him. It wasn't hard to convince himself that locking Slippy in that command room was for the toad's own good.

After making a stop at the mercenary team's sparse armory room, Peppy told the bridge-bound Slippy to try to hail Fox and the others using the _Great Fox_'s powerful communication equipment. In the meantime, Peppy had attempted to do the same with his handheld device. He had been less than successful.

From just inside the darkened closet, Peppy could hear the muffled voices of the armed dock workers on the other side.

"C'mon man, the boss wants the geyser _now_."

"I'm goin' as fast as I can dipshit; you think hacking's something you just _do_?"

"Let him work, let him work."

Peppy listened to the petty argument continue as he mentally laid out his plan once more. If all went well, he would be able to drive the intruders all the way back into Yohan Depot's docking bay. Briefly, a question of the dock worker's motive sprang to mind, but he quickly silenced the thought. Being on the defense, this was one of the special times when the elder mercenary felt it was okay to break his own rule of always asking questions before violence.

"In position, Peppy," a dry, metallic voice stated through Peppy's ear-mounted com unit, stealing his attention.

"Good ROB; shoot to kill," the hare responded as he examined the maintenance closet again for tactical cover.

"Affirmative," came the monotone reply.

"Slippy, any luck reaching Fox?" Peppy again spoke to the com unit, switching channels.

"No," the toad said, sounding confused, "Its faint enough to just be background static, but it almost seems like there's some sort of passive communications jamming going on here. I can't get a signal outside the _Great Fox_."

Peppy was about to encourage Slippy to keep trying, but a sharp voice from the other side of the hanger wall caught his ear.

"Got it! There, now you can get your precious…"

Peppy knelt down behind some metal crates in the darkness and poked the barrel of his weapon over the top. His field of fire spread out the closet door and into the hallway; his shotgun was motionless in the hands of a combat-hardened veteran. In the dark recesses of the alcove room, he would be well hidden.

The hare placed a flash-bang grenade on the ground beside him.

And waited.

"_Wherever you are Fox, I hope you get back here soon."_

The hanger door slid open.

The air was suddenly crackling with the staccato of repeated gunfire as ROB opened up. The robot wasn't the ideal combat model, but his proficiency wasn't what was important; only his presence.

Cries of confusion and pain sounded from the hanger as the unsuspecting intruders were caught off guard. For a team apparently tasked with raiding the _Great Fox_, Peppy found it odd that they weren't ready for a fight. It was a few moments before they reorganized and began returning fire through the doorway. Their weapons poked through the threshold just enough so that Peppy could see their muzzle flashes.

Then, as planned, ROB began retreating further into the ship, his metallic clomping on the floor plates growing slowly fainter. It wasn't until he stopped firing his weapons altogether that the intruders dared poke their heads into the main hallway. When they saw the all clear, they began filing into the _Great Fox _proper.

Peppy let the first three workers charge into the hallway before lining up the fourth in his sights.

With a loud _crack _he pulled the trigger, blindsiding the unlucky fellow with a concussion slug to the head and dropping him to the ground.

He cocked the weapon's lever forward and back, ejecting the smoking cartridge and loading another into the chamber. The spent metal casing clinked to the floor.

One of the first three who rushed past unwisely backpedaled and stooped to check on his fallen comrade. He had just noticed the open door of the dark closet when another of Peppy's slugs found its mark.

The hare cocked his shotgun again amidst shouts of confusion.

He managed to graze a third intruder before they caught on to his location. A cloud of bullets pinged off the metal crates surrounding the elder mercenary as the dock workers began randomly sticking their weapons around the corner and firing. But through the hail of munitions, Peppy kept one eye exposed, waiting for a brave one to peak around the corner.

He wasn't disappointed.

The _crack _of his shotgun joined the cacophony of sound as he felled another opponent.

"_That leaves one more in the hallway,_" he reasoned, drawing the lever of his weapon back again.

Peppy glided up from his hiding place to the closet wall that bordered the hallway with a smoothness that was uncanny for his age. He made sure to grab the flash-bang.

Priming the charge and edging towards the closet door, he quickly peaked into the hallway and ducked back. Satisfied, he lobbed the non-lethal grenade at an angle, ricocheting it off the hanger door's frame and into the docking bay beyond.

By the time he heard the startled yelps and deafening _boom_ from the hanger, he was already running through the hallway, heading deeper into the _Great Fox_. A few steps from the maintenance closet, he caught the remaining adversary by surprise.

The man's eyes widened and he tried to raise his own weapon to block, but Peppy had the drop on him. The hare bashed the dock worker's temple with the butt of his shotgun and carried through, stepping past him. The thud was satisfying.

"_This is going too well."_

_

* * *

_

So, that was an absurd downtime between chapters, huh? But, what else is new I suppose...sorry guys. As always though, let me know what you think!

**Northern-Megas****:** Thanks Megas! I'm really digging those quotes by the way; cool stuff man.

**RedBay****: **As always, thanks for the review RedBay; and I'm glad you noticed the heavier emotional themes. I was going for that, and I wasn't sure how well I did in conveying it.

**Feuerstoss****: **Thank you! I have a sneaking feeling you may be on to something...or not. Guess we'll find out... :)

**Assassin: **Truthfully Assassin, I owe you one. Your extremely kind review was what pushed me over the edge on getting back into the fanfic writing swing of things. My last update was back in June, so it wasn't QUITE 3 years that I've been absent (:P), but I understand the frustration of having an author bail on a story. I'm sorry. I know it's the excuse that everyone here uses, but I've been quite busy in the last few months, so Mercenaries definitely took a back seat to other issues. But if you guys still want me to, I'll keep posting chapters as soon as I can. Thanks again Assassin :)


	17. Chapter 17: Jailbreak

**XVII: **_Jailbreak_

_-  
_

They said nothing to each other, though they both heard it.

In a quiet hallway deep within Yohan Depot, a pair of guards stood idly by a single, closed doorway in an otherwise featureless corridor. They were both dressed in identical Cornerian uniforms, though neither fit their owner quite right. In addition, each wore a black gas mask, fitted like muzzles over their face. Their eyes were listless and bored through the plastic visor. They had been given quick orders to find the specific doorway they now stood next to, and wait for further instructions. Also, kill anyone that came out. But according to their superiors, that was unlikely. So basically, just wait.

The sharp retort of gunfire erupted again from the main docking bay, much further down the hallway. It was accompanied by the confused shouts and curses that normally indicated a fight. Specifically, the sort that indicated an offensive fight. Their comrades must have been storming the mercenary ship.

And here they were, standing guard over a door. Babysitting a slab of metal.

Looking at each other, it was plainly visible that the younger of the two wanted to run off and join the fight. The other guard, probably older by a factor of two, could see it in his counterpart's eyes. Or, in what he could see of his counterpart's eyes; their visors were beginning to fog up from their own breath. Cheap, economy-minded hunks of plastic. But that was to be expected of the mass produced equipment they had found on the station. It seemed counter-intuitive that the military would allow such gear into their soldiers' arsenal, but in the older guard's experience, politics could do remarkable things. Also in the older man's experience, he could get mentally sidetracked very easily. Where was he?

"C'mon; the fuck are we doing here? Shouldn't we be _doing _something to help?"

Oh, right. The kid. The furtive glances towards the source of the sounds, the readjustment of his grip on his rifle; the younger of the two was downright anxious.

"_Precocious little fella; thinks its all run and gun," _the older guard thought, sighing into his air filter. "_I'm not grey, but shit, I'd like to think there's more to soldiering than dashing headfirst into a firefight."_

The older man looked away briefly, shifting his own grip on the firearm he held loosely in his hands. His gas filtering system cycled with a hiss. Pleading eyes met him when he glanced back at the other guard moments later. At least, as much _pleading _as a a headstrong soldier could muster.

"Ah shit, just go already," he finally said, punctuating his thin, transmitted voice with a click. "We both know this is pointless anyway."

Looking at the elder, then down the hall, and then at the elder again, the younger guard verbalized a quick word of thanks and dashed off, sprinting full tilt down the corridor. He tore off his gas mask and tossed it to the floor at the old man's feet as he went, eliciting another sigh of annoyance from the remaining guard. Another click from his com promptly followed.

"Goddamn kids_," _he said aloud to himself, now that the com in the other gas mask was unoccupied.

Something behind him began to hiss.

He flipped around and trained his rifle on the door out of instinct, raising the aiming reticule to his eye. But then he lowered it as his head cocked to the side out of confusion. That wasn't supposed to happen.

The guard wasn't stupid; he wasn't told anything more than his orders, but he could deduce enough from their assigned equipment to imagine the scenario playing out in the room. Inside, there were probably a small number of people the higher ups wanted dead. Probably the surviving escort pilots. They weren't killed right away in the hanger, because of the danger of one of them getting to their ship and escaping. So instead, they were being gassed in a room nice and far from the docking bay. Their fighters would make nice replacements for the damage they caused earlier. But the point was, the pilots were being gassed. Thus, the gas mask. Thus, the time spent waiting.

But the door was beginning to slide open by itself, and soon a cascade of powder-white vapor was flowing into the desolate hallway. That wasn't supposed to happen.

Again, the guard raised his rifle to fire, and again, he lowered it in confusion. The space beyond was completely dark, like the power had gone out. The gas hadn't yet flooded the entire room, either; it already began to dissipate into the corridor, but never from more than neck height.

"Wha…"

Desperate claws burst out from the darkness.

The guard panicked and tried to train his weapon on the fox, but it was knocked aside before he could get a solid bead. Out of reflex he pulled the trigger, sending a single bullet pinging harmlessly down the hallway. The gunshot's retort blended in seamlessly with the battle raging in Yohan Depot's docking bay.

He managed to call out gruffly for help, only to hear his quiet echo in the gas mask at his feet.

A fist connected with his throat, shocking his respiratory system and eliciting a string of retched gasps.

His mask was torn away, exposing him to the stale taste of the station's recycled air. The guard had never truly noticed that the station's air had any particular taste to it before, and he briefly wondered, while the rusty-furred fox wrestled with him, why it was that his mind decided to register this fact so clearly. Especially given the circumstances. But there was that mental meandering again.

The guard pondered this fact as a boot smashed into his knee, buckling him off balance as he continued to choke. The guard felt a second set of hands grasp his torso. He was suddenly sailing along the smooth floor plates of the hallway, towards the blackened room he had once been guarding.

His suffocating lungs welcomed the white fog with greed.

* * *

Rhena snatched up the mask from the hallway. She waited for her breathing to return to normal - her lungs were thirsty for air after holding her breath for so long - before slipping it over her face and turning back to the room she had just hurled the guard. There was something he still had she needed to retrieve.

Bill began to tell her to hold on, but the wolf had already disappeared into the black and fog. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted another protective mask on the ground and grabbed it. He toyed with the adjustable straps and muzzle piece before he donned it. Given the situation he had just escaped, it never hurt to be certain of the fit. And even so, he planned on holding his breath as long as he could anyway; just in case. Satisfied enough, he followed Rhena into the conference room, vanishing from sight to the Star Fox mercenaries gathered in the hallway. He too had something he didn't want to leave behind.

Fox watched all this as he rubbed his bruised knuckles and took stock of the situation.

The hallway, while fairly narrow in width, was still plenty large enough for the heavy gas to disperse harmlessly; it helped that there was a vent thrusting clean air through directly above the conference room door. Even so, the mercenary took a few steps away from the delta of evaporating gas that had formed at the threshold, just in case. He was briefly reminded of a science class he had taken back at the Cornerian Military Academy, when the teacher had them all do experiments with liquid nitrogen. He remembered it had acted just like the gas here did, 'pouring' and 'flowing' like a liquid until it evaporated into thin air.

Falco grunted and set the unconscious coyote on his shoulders down several paces from the door. He knelt with a look of concern and put two fingers under the jawbone of the solider, checking her pulse. Soldier. Linka looked young enough to be his little sister, barring the whole 'different species' thing. Maybe that was why he was so ready to pick her up off the floor back in the room. Kids had no place in a combat zone. His posture relaxed as he felt her weak but steady pulse. She'd be okay for now; the dose of gas wasn't lethal.

Fox was more concerned about Miyu. She was bracing herself against the corridor wall with both hands, her head hanging between them. He could hear her loud, haggard gasps for air. Being the shortest of the group, save the unconscious Linka, she had inhaled more of the gas than anyone else, even as she tried like all of them to hold her breath at the end. Fox could see brief spasms rack her limbs as her muscles tried to shake off the numbing effects of the poison. Her lungs must have been having similar problems, as every cough sounded like it was drawing from deep down in her body. He took a step towards her.

Rhena and Bill re-emerged from the conference room at that moment. They looked at each other and Bill nodded, as if coaxing Rhena into doing something she didn't feel comfortable with. His muzzle was moving, but due to the mask over his head, only Rhena could actually hear what he was saying.

"Hey merc," Rhena called to Fox reluctantly as she peeled her mask off and tossed him a small black pistol, "I got that from the guard. I can't say I trust you myself, but I'll take Grey's word. _They_, whoever _they_ are, because they definitely aren't Cornerian Military, seem to be after you guys as well, and that'll have to do for now."

Fox caught it neatly with one hand, looking over it for a second before cocking the slide at the top. Fox glanced back at the red-haired pilot, guessing that Bill had managed to convince her that his crew was worth having faith in. The mercenary also noticed with a smirk that the wolf had kept the unfortunate guard's more powerful rifle for herself.

Bill had collected a much larger burden from the room. Namely, the body of the tan fox who had succumbed to the gas.

"_I think they said his name was Cratz," _Fox realized, observing the fellow vulpine.

Bill noticed Fox's stare and shifted the weight on his shoulders. He guessed what the mercenary was thinking. "I know…but he saved us," Bill explained, his voice strong but somber, "And I'm not going to lose another pilot today."

Fox nodded once with a reassuring expression. He understood.

"Alright, let's go," the mercenary captain said, jerking a thumb down the hallway towards Yohan Depot's hanger, "I don't know what the hell is going on, but I think it's pretty clear this isn't a friendly place. Let's sort this out after we _get _out. Falco, grab the girl."

Falco's head dropped. "For the love of...," he muttered, reaching for the unconscious cadet he had just deposited on the floor and slinging her up over his shoulders.

Rhena glanced sidelong at Bill and frowned; she didn't exactly like the idea of a mercenary being in charge of her pilot like that. And she definitely didn't like the idea of a mercenary giving her orders. But the hound caught the look and nodded with whatever bit of smile he could muster; now wasn't the time for a petty dispute. Rhena's frown didn't fade, but she grunted a reluctant acknowledgment. The mercenary was right, regardless of how she felt about him taking point; now wasn't the time to argue chain of command. Or anything else for that matter.

The group coalesced and double-timed down the hall, moving at a light jog so as to allow the two of them carrying bodies to keep up. They moved as quietly as possible, but even then their footsteps echoed painfully off the metal walls of the corridor. Sounds of a prolonged gunfight grew slowly as they neared the hanger, prompting especially the mercenaries to pick up the pace, as they knew two of their own were still in the _Great Fox_.

The hallway eventually spilled into a cargo storage area just off of the main docking bay. A collection of large, metal shipping containers and smaller rectangular crates dotted the antechamber, creating an unorganized maze that opened up completely on one side to the giant hanger of the space station. The ceiling, while only half as high as that of the docking bay proper, was still plenty high to give the illusion of a warehouse.

Through the clutter, the group could make out the entry ramp to the _Great Fox _in the distance. The sounds of gunfire were coming from inside.

"Peppy and Slippy must be putting up a hell of a fight," Fox commented, noticing how long the sounds of battle had been sustained.

"Well..._Peppy _must be putting up a hell of a fight," Falco offered, shrugging as best he could with the burden on his shoulders, "Realistically speaking."

Hurried footfalls to the right. Fox turned and saw a trio of guards burst from an adjacent hallway not five meters away, completely oblivious to the group of escaping pilots. They were armed with assault rifles and had the standard issue Cornerian uniforms on, but something still seemed off about them. Maybe it was that an identical guard had just been watching over the room where the pilots were almost gassed to death.

Without thinking further, Fox raised his pistol and fired twice, watching the leader of the three jerk abruptly and tumble to the ground.

He immediately regretted his impulse though, as the remaining pair of guards dove to the floor out of instinct, taking cover and disappearing behind a stack of metal crates. Fox responded by leaping for a row of boxes, just as the guards spotted him and began to return fire with their automatic weapons. Sparks erupted around him as munitions assaulted his shelter, but he was safely out of sight for the moment.

The rest of the group had taken the more flight-oriented response to appearence of the guards, and ducked back into the hallway they had just come from. It seemed like the guards hadn't noticed them yet.

Fox winced as another sharp _ping _battered his ear drums. He pushed himself off the floor and leaned his back against his cover, making sure to keep his head low. He glanced towards the rest of the pilots, only to see that they weren't where he left them. He panicked for a spilt second that he might have been ditched, but Rhena's apperance at the hallway threshold reassured him. In fact, it looked like she had a plan, judging by how she was trying to get his attention.

As soon as she got it, Rhena pointed silently but firmly towards herself, and then towards the enemies with two fingers. A burst of fire caused both of them to duck further into cover for a moment before continuing. She then jabbed a finger at Fox, and made a wrap around motion with her hand. He had never taken a course in Cornerian combat symbology, but he savvied well enough. A flanking attack.

The wolf raised three fingers and counted back to one as Fox steeled himself for the dash he was about to undertake. Into the open. With two guns trained on him. His muscles tensed, even as his nerves screamed. Years of experience in all manner of combat had stopped these warring internal signals from manifesting on his face, but they could never be prevented completely. And while perhaps a little more suicidal than he would have liked, it was just another maneuver for the mercenary.

When Rhena hit zero, he pushed himself to his feet and out of cover against every survival instinct, and ran.

Rhena raised her rifle with practiced form, stepping out into the antechamber from the hallway and unleashing a hail of metal slugs at the pair of guards. None of the projectiles connected, but the gunmen were forced to stop their tracking of the flanking fox and dip back into the safety of cover. She continued to unload in bursts, absorbing the recoil of one and pausing enough to regain her aim before squeezing the trigger again. Just like every other piece of equipment they had come across so far in the station, the rifle she held was Cornerian, and she knew the model well. It felt natural in her fingers.

Fox pumped hard and made his way in a wide loop around the guards. He vaulted a crate with ease as he was nearing a good position, placing his free hand on the lip and pusing himself over without slowing down. He didn't see the toolbox carelessly left on the floor on the other side though.

The vulpine landed awkwardly as his foot slipped, knocking him off balance. The fact that he was at full tilt didn't help either, and it was all he could do to brace himself as he tumbled. He landed on his side and kept sliding past the box he was hoping to surprise the enemy from. Instead, he sailed straight out into the open. He kept enough wits about him to start firing.

The guards were caught completely naked from the side. Small caliber bullets tore through the first as he knelt, unaware of the fox's presence until it was far too late. The second guard jerked his head to the side and spotting him in the open. Out of reflex he stood up and backpedaled, firing at the mercenary. This led him directly into Rhena's line of fire though, and her assault rifle made short work of him.

To his horror, Fox realized after a beat of silence that his new position left his back wide open to the main docking bay now behind him. But it was quickly made clear that the other dock workers present in the hanger were much more preoccupied with whatever was happening at the _Great Fox_ to notice the side skirmish in the antechamber. Muffled gunfire still sounded at regular intervals from inside; they hadn't been noticed.

Fox stood and waved an 'all-clear' to Rhena, and made his way towards the fallen guards. He pocketed the small pistol he was armed with and snatched up one of the recently orphaned rifles instead, grabbing a second one and tossing it to a surprised Miyu, who had just entered the area from the hallway. The lynx was the only one not currently armed and not carrying a body that prevented said arming. She caught it after a moment of fumbling, and trotted over to the fox. The sound of Falco's deep laughter caught Fox's ear, and he realized what a ridiculous stunt it must have looked like he pulled, sliding into combat like that. He made a mental note to thank the toolbox.

"I wish people would stop chucking dangerous objects at me," she half joked as she joined him.

A strange moment followed. Fox had just liberated a bandolier from one of the guards when the lynx stopped in front of him. Wrapping the cloth ammo sash around his shoulder, he plucked a fresh clip from it and switched out the current one of his newly acquired rifle. When he noticed her standing across from him, he handed her a full clip as well. She slid the spent cartridge out of her own weapon and took it, their eyes meeting as she did so.

Instead of the glare of animosity he was used to from her, the lynx responded to his neutral glance with one of her own. It was almost as if she had called a temporary truce on the past in exchange for a clear head for the present. A mutual white flag, perhaps. Whatever it was, it only lasted a moment though, as they nodded at each other and rejoined the rest of the pilots.

Before Miyu even took a step though, she noticed one of the smaller metal crates the dead guards had been taking cover behind. The lid had been pushed slightly ajar, probably from the last guard's flailing attempt to flee. A burst of curiosity overtook her, and without any sort of cautious hesitation, she grasped the thin lid and shoved it aside. She didn't quite know what to expect, but it probably wasn't what she found.

"What the…"

Fox had taken a few steps when he heard Miyu's whispered words. He stopped immediately and spun around, regarding her. People didn't say a thing like that unless they were surprised. And surprised was a bad thing to be while escaping somewhere.

"What is it?"

"Come here," Miyu beckoned without looking up from the contents of the crate, "Take a look at this." Her gaze was intriguing in what it said about what she had found; it wasn't the disgusted blanch of looking at something truly despicable, nor the disheartened blankness of discovering something truly intimidating. It was simple confusion. Simple, uncomprehending, _confusion_.

Fox trotted back to Miyu's side and followed her line of sight into the container. As he did so, the others noticed the two and moved to join them, careful to keep an eye out for any other sudden surprises.

When Fox found out what the lynx had discovered though, he couldn't help but think that he must have abruptly assumed the same exact expression she wore.

Lining the inside of the body-sized container was a layer of glowing blue filaments, arranged in a tight-knit sort of nest. The fibers pulsed almost imperceptibly slowly, brighter and then dimmer, but never anything more than a faint background light. Only the fact that the lid of the crate was still mostly covering the top and thus creating a shadow inside allowed the blue illumination to shine. But whether the filaments themselves were providing the actual light or they were merely reflecting it from another source couldn't be seen.

Within this nest was a clear, coffin-like box, wider at the top and thinner at the bottom, though still possessing rigid lines and angles. It was suspended by the blue fibers, not quite reaching the bottom floor of the crate; if they flipped the lid of the crate, they would probably find more of the glowing stuff on the underside.

So the purpose of the patchwork of fibers was determined; to hold the clear box steady and secure during transit of the larger crate around it. But the clear box was completely opaque with a white gas. The vapors shifted and drifted within the sealed box, making it clear that something was perturbing them inside, but also preventing any of the assembled pilots from seeing what that something was.

Falco was the first to break the silence.

"What _is _that?"

"They're not weapons, that's for damn sure," Bill noted.

"I think what's _inside _it is more important," Rhena commented, tapping on the clear box with the barrel of her rifle, "This looks like the gas they were pumping into our room back-"

A tiny tap that wasn't from Rhena's weapon silenced all of them.

At the precise point where the wolf's weapon had been hitting the box, four fingers and a thumb were now pressed against the material from the inside, in a pattern that suggested they were trying to grab something. The rest of the fingers past the tips were invisible thanks to the vapors, but it didn't take much imagination to trace the digits to a hand, and the hand to an arm, and the arm to…

"Guh! _People_? Blue Arrow is shipping _people_?!"

"Shit…"

"So I take it you guys didn't know about this?"

"Easy kitty; he's not getting out of that box. You can go change your panties now."

"O-of course not…the briefing said it was a weapons cache. Nothing more."

"Stuff it birdboy, you jumped higher than I did. And with that girl on your back, that's actually kinda impressive."

"This isn't right. There is a living person in there; a living, _breathing _person in there! Why? What-"

"Keep it down!" Rhena finally barked in a harsh whisper from the middle of the group. She pointed towards the _Great Fox_ with her gun.

It was a sign with an obvious meaning; they were still in the middle of an escape. There would be time to worry about the implications of whatever it was they had just stumbled across later. If they made it out alive. For now, they had more important things to worry about it. The group understood immediately and without so much as another word began to move towards the carrier, abandoning their discovery with only minor hesitation. All except for Miyu, who couldn't help but take a final look inside the crate.

She placed her hands on the lip of the crate and peered inside, sliding the top further away. Her actions uncovered a small, laminated card taped haphazardly to the bottom portion of the clear box; the section where the feet of the body inside would be.

Without thinking, she lifted it. It peeled away from the box without any resistance. Bringing the card into the bright lights of the docking bay, she read several lines of text printed on it.

---

Staff Sergeant Alai Arkanian

23rd Cornerian Rangers

Serial Number CAR-0089756

Status: Yellow

---

'_So he's a soldier, huh?' _It wasn't until she finished reading that she realized someone might come looking for the card at some point. The piece of cardstock had several unchecked boxes and empty lines printed on it, making it obvious that it was some sort of record to be checked regularly. But there was no use trying to hide the fact that someone had seen what was inside the crate now. Even if she did try to put it back, they would notice the card wasn't fastened to the box.

Standing back up, she bit the card between her teeth and tugged at the crate's lid until it again fit securely in its proper place. She then removed the tag from her jaw and looked at it one last time before pocketing it and jogging quietly to catch up with everyone else.

They had stopped and crouched behind the last group of metal boxes before the wide open expanse of floor space between the antechamber and the _Great Fox_. The imposing mercenary vessel loomed in front of them, still a good hundred meters away with nary a hint of cover in sight. The quartet of Blue Arrow freighters were still parked in front of the carrier, though they were too far away to offer any valuable shelter from fire. However, the collection of partially unloaded cargo crates scattered around the freighters made ideal cover to defend from.

From the looks of things, the mixed Cornerian and Mercenary pilots were out of luck.

"Hey, you hear that?" Bill asked nobody in particular, keeping his gaze affixed to the _Great Fox_.

Fox cocked his head to the side as his ears strained to hear whatever noise Bill was inquiring about. But he couldn't hear a sound other than his own suppressed breathing. "…No," he replied.

"It's quiet," Rhena finished, nodding as she caught on to what Bill was saying, "They stopped fighting in your ship."

Fox listened again. She was right. The cavernous Yohan docking bay was very nearly completely devoid of sound, as well as movement for that matter. It appeared they were suddenly alone. Fox felt the eerieness of the situation. Only an hour before, the same scene had been bustling with workmen and activity.

"Should we go for it?" Miyu asked inquisitively, turning to the lupine Flight Sergeant.

"I can't see any alternative," Rhena responded, reloading her assault rifle and ratcheting the bolt. She turned to her Flight Sergeant. "Your call, sir."

Bill breathed deeply and slid Cratz's body to a more comfortable position on his shoulders. There was no point in stalling any more than they had. If they waited for guards to re-emerge from Fox's carrier, it would be too late to attempt any sort of escape. "Let's do it," he grunted, rising to his feet and making a break across the open floor of the hanger.

He was alone only for a second before the rest of the pilots caught up and joined his dash for the _Great Fox_. No longer concerned with stealth, their boots pounded on the metal deck, sounding like a stampede as they crossed the open space. They covered half the distance in moments, though it seemed like minutes to the pilots. The mercenary's carrier seemed to stretch further from them even as they approached it. And still, the eerie silence persisted.

Bill looked around as he ran. They were truly exposed. All it took was one dock worker to peak out of some hiding spot…

"Mark!" Bill called out as a guard ambled down the _Great Fox_'s gangway, unaware of the rushing pilots until the hound's exclamation.

The worker stood wide-eyed before fumbling for his slung rifle; he hadn't even touched the metal of his weapon when bursts of fire from Miyu and Rhena took him down. Twelve bullets impacted in and around him in split-second succession, convulsing his body and pushing him off the edge of the ramp to the metal deck below. He struck the ground with a meaty _thud _and didn't move.

The pilots were within a stone's throw from the _Great Fox._

The group poured on the effort, finally reaching the base of the carrier's ramp. Just as they began to scale it though, the distinct sound of distant gunfire erupted from the far end of Yohan's docking bay. Urgent calls of more armed dock workers soon followed. Nobody broke their stride, even as the air around them began to buzz with errant rounds.

Fox was at point. He raised his rifle to his shoulder and crouched as he reached the top of the entry ramp, aiming into the smaller hanger. His weapon had scarcely stopped firing when the rest of the group charged past him into the relative safety of the mercenary's ship. They were careful to step over a pair of bodies with fresh bullet wounds.

Bill grunted as he crossed the threshold, stepping to the side and carefully dropping Cratz's body to the floor. As he did, he noticed that the tan fox had accumulated a pattern of puncture marks on his backside, no doubt from where a couple bullets meant for the Cornerian hound were intercepted. Bill paused and stared down at the discovery, even as Rhena kicked the weapon of one of the dead intruders his way. "That's two I owe you," he said quietly to his deceased comrade, stooping to pick up the rifle from his feet.

He could feel the lump of unexpressed anguish begin to form in his throat as he truly realized for the first time that another of his pilots was now dead, but he quickly dispelled the feeling. There would plenty of time for all of that when it seemed like his own military wasn't trying to kill him and his friends.

A few meters away, Falco gently but quickly set Linka down against the landing gear of a CDF fighter. As he did so, just as her back touched the landing struts, she started and began to choke, coughing forcefully as she awoke. She was gasping for oxygen between every convulsion of her airways, but she was breathing.

"Glad you could finally join us princess," Falco quipped as he bent down and picked up the second dead worker's rifle. He couldn't keep a bit of mirth out of his voice, "You're just in time for the party."

All the young coyote could do between wheezes was shoot the avian a questioning look as he ran to join Rhena at the massive docking bay doors they had just entered through.

Meanwhile, Fox arrived at the threshold to the interior hallway of the _Great Fox_ with Bill and Miyu in tow. Familiar fingers darted across a touch pad on the wall just beside the door, and soon the mercenary ship rumbled to life. The vulpine glanced behind him and saw to his grim satisfaction that the _Great Fox_'s hanger doors were painfully, slowly lessening their open gap. Falco and Rhena slid gradually along with the closing doors, firing shots into Yohan Depot beyond to ward off the advancing attackers. It would easily be another minute before the doors closed completely.

"Pass a clip and go ahead, Fox," Falco called back, loosing another burst into an unlucky dock worker, "We've got this." The hollow pinging of dozens of angry bullets ricocheting off the heavy metal doors punctuated his sentence. Falco laughed as he ducked back behind the door unscathed. Fox knew well enough that finding humor in survival was how the bird coped with combat, but Rhena just looked it him with concern. As if she needed another reason to.

The vulpine nodded and withdrew a clip of ammunition from his bandolier, lobbing it across the starfighter-filled floor towards Falco. The avian caught it handily and placed it in his spent rifle, rejoining Rhena's stream of fire. But not before catching the weird look she gave him.

"Relax babe; not a scratch on me," he said with a grin, knowing just how much what he said would get under the wolf's skin. He wasn't disappointed.

Without another word, Fox led Bill and Miyu through the smaller portal, into the depths of the _Great Fox_.

* * *

ROB was dead; or as dead as an android could be.

In the corner of a secluded hallway in the _Great Fox_, ROB's chassis lay slumped against a wall, as motionless as the steel panels of the corridor. A small ring of junk and metallic bits and pieces surrounded the automaton, cast off from his frame from one violent impact of metal on metal or another. Empty clips of automatic ammunition and shell casings littered the deck plates as well, mingling amidst his broken pieces.

ROB's metal structure, his dull and lusterless skeleton, was fractured in several places, and crushed clean through in others. His weapons in particular were spared no mercy by whatever onslaught had besieged him. They were bent and blasted apart, ensuring, if nothing else, that they would be no threat to anyone again.

Not that ROB would be much of a threat anymore, anyway.

His linear optical lense was a ghostly black, as were any other of the normally bright and cheery status lights that dotted his body. This lack of light as a whole gave his ruined form a more menacing, hallowed out feel; the sort of vibe the sentient, bipedal organisms that built him displayed when they experienced a deep anger or determination. Strange then, that in death ROB gained an extra shade of kinsmenship with the living beings who created him.

A small, silent light began flashing in the interior base of his neck.

ROB's internal CPU clicked, and an incredibly strained _whirr_ could be heard over the background noise of the _Great Fox_. His backup power wheezed to life.

A small antenna, hidden deep within the jagged mess, began to transmit information frantically. Simultaneously, a non-descript console on the _Great Fox's_ bridge began receiving a weak stream of data, grasping ROB's dying transmissions out of the air. The reserve power contained within the automaton wouldn't last much longer; it was only put in place for such a situation as this. A self-contained hard disk would normally negate the need for such a last ditch measure, but with a metal slug lodged firmly in the vital, circular platters, there was no other choice. What vital information was contained within the android's virtual memory would have to be off-loaded before all power, and subsequently the data, was lost.

Bit after byte of information flooded the _Great Fox_'s databanks. There would only be enough time to transfer ROB's most important files; any unique experiences or semblance of personality obtained over his total operational life would unfortunately have to be sacrificed.

Unable to spare any precious power for external sensors, ROB was completely unwitting to the presence of three new entities standing over him.

An orange fox stood at their lead, sporting a silver flight vest with the same crimson emblem that adorned ROB's charred breast plate. Flanking the vulpine, a lynx in similar dress and a hound in Cornerian green stood attentively, listening for any sign of hostile life in the hallway. All were armed with rough, used looking assault rifles.

The fox lingered on the automaton for a few moments more, sweeping his eyes across the metallic carcass. He sighed quietly, apparently wishing to spend more time at the android's side, but unable to due to more pressing matters. His lips parted, as if to say something, but they quickly closed. He looked confused.

"…Thanks ROB," he finally whispered before raising his rifle again and taking off with a hurried step, his companions padding softly after him.

ROB's circuits hummed with activity as his voltage dropped. Soon, he in his current form would utterly cease to be. The data he transmitted would be his digital swan song,

Just one more file…

* * *

A hail of gunfire caught the intruders off guard; they never stood a chance. They fell where they just moments before stood outside the _Great Fox_'s sealed bridge door.

Fox lowered the rifle from his shoulder and nodded. The combined fire from his companions and himself was more than enough to take care of their surprised victims. They stepped out from the lift they had taken from the ground floor of the carrier.

"Looks like they were trying to hack the bridge," he commented to nobody in particular, spying a handheld device plugged into the bridge doorpad, still gripped in a lifeless hand.

"Mm," Bill agreed, approaching the pair of dead dock workers with his own weapon leading, unable to take the appearance of death at face value. Fox and Miyu followed behind him as they neared the bridge door.

The hound gave each of the downed intruders a swift kick to the ribs, receiving nothing but a dull thud from one. But from the other, his boot's bite yielded a quiet, pathetic moan. One survived the surprise attack. Miyu, who had been watching, cursed and raised her rifle, finger tightening on the trigger.

"Wait," Bill said, taking a step closer to the injured intruder, "Let this one live. I want to know what's going on here." Miyu nodded, but kept her weapon trained where it was, watching for any sign of hostility. Bill placed his boot on the intruder's weapon and sent it skidding across the corridor floor. He then set about securing the man, ensuring he wouldn't endanger the group further. Based on his wounds, it didn't look like he would survive long anyway.

Fox stepped over the body of the dead trespasser and flicked the hacking device away from the bridge doorpad. It fell with a clatter as the vulpine punched in a complex code. He was rewarded with an affirmative chirp.

Like layers of a gourd, the heavy blast doors of the bridge parted and retracted into the bulkheads, gliding on worn pneumatics and rusted tracks. As they did, he flipped his rifle and jammed the stock of it against the metal in a familiar pattern. The hollow retorts rang clearly.

"Slippy! Peppy! We're coming through!" the mercenary captain shouted through the opening doors. Fox returned his rifle to a loose position in his hands and allowed himself to finally relax; the doors obviously hadn't been pried open by the intruder's actions. There was no need to fear what was on the other side.

In fact, Slippy and Peppy would probably be ecstatic to see them. While retaking the _Great Fox_, the mercenary and his entourage failed to come across either the hare's or the toad's body, or any trace of their presence. So logically, the fox thought, they had holed up in the bridge. The sealed blast doors only confirmed the theory.

The last blockade hissed and parted, revealing an empty room.

Fox stared, perplexed. _"That's unexpected..."_

Standing next to him, Miyu tightened her grip on the rifle in her hands. She lifted it into a firing position. Fox saw her motions as he glanced at her, able to understand exactly what she was thinking at the moment without a word shared. She locked eyes with him and maintained a blank, yet universally recognizable, expression. Something wasn't right here.

It was during this brief exchange a high velocity, small caliber slug whizzed between them at eye level. The bright chemical trail burned itself into their retinas as the sharp retort of a gunshot echoed down the corridor. The round ricocheted harmlessly away, even as Bill and Miyu instinctively dove out of the doorway.

"_Shit_!" Fox yelped, falling onto one knee and jamming his rifle butt into his shoulder in preparation to fire. His finger vibrated on the trigger before he saw his target quivering from behind the bridge's captain's seat. The sight of the terrified toad dropped Fox's guard and he relaxed again, but not before his sudden, erratic motions caused him to lose balance and fall backwards into a sitting position. He lurched forward and bent over to catch his breath.

"God-_dammit _Slippy!" The mercenary half shouted, half sighed as he stood upright again, "I _told _you we were coming through."

"S-sorry Fox," the toad whimpered, standing from his cover and bounding forward to meet the group at the bridge threshold. "I didn't know it was you; I-I didn't know you guys were _alive_!"

Miyu reluctantly lowered her own rifle and glanced sideways at Bill. The hound returned her inquisitive gaze with a shrug and a knowing nod. Yes, Slippy had always been like that. She smirked.

"Fine," Fox said as he set his rifle down against the door frame, his voice back to a more pressing tone, "C'mon, help me get this bucket in the air; we've gotta get out of here, _now_."

* * *

**Foxkong****: **Awesome! I love these kinds of reviews. Let's get to it...

Okay, so, first of all, yes: I definitely intend to have the OCs play a bigger role. There's only a couple as of right now, but there will be more and deeper characterizations of them in the future. Which leads me to your next point. I realized a couple chapters (so roughly 5 months? Ouch.) ago that the story was starting to stall. I was focusing too much on the characterization of characters that didn't really need it (main cast), as well as the how Miyu and them meet up. I'm happy enough with the way it turned out, but yes, it definitely took longer than it should have. Which is why I started putting more emphasis on advancing the story recently. Next, dialogue is a tricky subject in my book. I've found that you have to strike a proper balance between verbal interaction and description, or else a scene will appear either lifeless (not enough dialogue), or devoid of character (not enough description). And unfortunately, I tend to overcompensate in one direction or the other. So I will continue to work on that. And finally, you have some very good examples there...I know I can't really explain it properly here, but you've definitely gotten me thinking.

As always, all reviews are good reviews in my opinion, but..._this_ is how writers improve, people. Thank you very much Foxkong. I'll be checking out your story shortly.

**RedBay****: **I understand; and please, don't feel pressured to leave a review every time you read a chapter if you don't want to. Seriously. I'll manage without you for a chapter or two if you need some down time, haha.

You bring up some very good points about pacing, and as always, provide some very good examples, as well. That's an interesting point about Rhena...I'm still fine-tuning the OCs a little, so looking back, there's been a little fluctuation as their personalities change in my mind a little bit from chapter to chapter. Hopefully I've gotten their main motivations and personalities across though. Thanks for the review RB.

**The Broken Wolf****: **Wow; thanks man! Your reviews are greatly appreciated and really made me smile. If I may say though, don't worry too much about the "locals" habit of nitpicking; they keep me sharp :) Also, "Hammerstroke" is officially my new favorite punctuation word.

**Assassin-clt **& **Northern-megas****:** Thank you, both of you, once again; its good to have you guys on board :)

-

Also, a big thank you to _all_ of my readers: this story just passed the 3,500 hit mark. Many thanks!


	18. Chapter 18: Uncertain Skies

**XVIII: **_Uncertain Skies

* * *

_

"…They _what?_"

"The survivors of Gamma Squadron and their mercenaries escaped, sir."

"How?"

"The Cornerians held this depot extraordinarily low on their list of priorities sir; it isn't equipped with a tractor beam strong enough to hold a ship of that size."

"…"

"Our fighters are still unfortunately deployed; the redundant course they set back from their unsuccessful 'raid' on the Blue Arrow freighters to throw off pursuit will keep them out in the cloud for another half hour. We can't raise them on communications systems, most likely due to the sector's background interference."

"So they'll escape. Wilkins, do you know what this will do to everything if, no, _when _they report in to Cornerian High Command? Cameras saw one of them opening a crate; they saw what was on those transports."

"Sir, that won't be a problem; I've already taken care of it. And if it eases your mind, we managed to obtain a parting gift."

"Go on."

"Peppy Hare."

"…"

"Yes, sir; he was taken from the ship before it took off."

"…This day isn't a total loss."

* * *

"Not happening Foxie."

"Fox, we've already put too much distance between us and Yohan," Bill insisted, "I don't know why they didn't scramble anything to track us down, but I'm not about to let you fly us back there."

"Seriously. I'm fond of Gramps too…"

"If you're that desperate, let us take our fighters and get out of here," Rhena chimed in, "'Because Grey's right; what you're thinking of is _suicide, _merc. Though I guess that's nothing new for today."

"…but I'm not about to risk everything we have to charge back into a friggin' kill zone. He wouldn't want us to either."

"Look Fox, we never found his body, right?" Miyu added, sensing the heaviness of the situation and allowing herself one final semi-friendly gesture, "So he's not dead. They wanted him alive. I'm sure he's fine…more or less."

"You know I'm right," Falco finished, refusing to stop talking as the others spoke.

Fox sat in his command chair on the _Great Fox_'s bridge, staring out the wide front viewport. His body listed to one side and his chin fell in one hand, propped on the chair's armrest. Ever since the ship's computer and a thorough search had reported Peppy's absence, he had been stuck in a trance. A mental impasse. The view outside the ship wasn't succeeding in distracting him at all, either.

The light blues of Sector X had faded almost completely as the _Great Fox_ reached the outskirts of the cloud, the gas replaced by black, empty space. Off in the distance ahead of them was a coin-sized Katina, far enough from the Lylat System's star to be seen clearly. As soon as the ship fully cleared vapor cloud, it would engage its cruise engines and shorten the trip to the dusty brown planet exponentially, but for now, the world was painfully small and distant.

Fox sighed and straightened his back, breathing deeply as his head tipped up and back. Despite his outward appearance, his thoughts were racing.

"_They're right_; _it would be utter suicide to rush back to Yohan and try to rescue Peppy. We were probably extremely lucky that we escaped with such little trouble…relatively. There's no telling what they would have in store for us when we got back. And that's assuming Peppy's even still at the station. Miyu's right; we never found a body. And those dock workers were rushing _into _the Great Fox when we arrived, so Peppy never left the ship. So he was probably captured. And you never keep a captive in the same place you captured him…"_

As the _Great Fox _flew further from the signal scrambling effects of Sector X's gas cloud, their connections with the outside universe were re-established. Download feeds from new services, contracting agencies, and other important organizations were reconnected. Their status screens on the communications console flickered from flashing-red to green one by one.

Slippy noticed this out of the corner of his eye; the group was spread out throughout the bridge, and he was seated in front of the console. He also noticed when one of the display screens of the console began showing information. The automatic sifter program had found something amidst the sea of incoming information worth showing.

"_But Peppy is…Peppy," _Fox continued to himself, _"I mean, he was Dad's best friend; he's family to me. Hell, he IS my family; I don't think there's anyone in Lylat I value more. Even if I live to settle down…well, that's another issue. But I can't just leave him. …I can't just leave him."_

"Um, guys?" Slippy squeaked wide-eyed from the communications console. "I-I think we have another problem."

"_Another _problem?" Falco asked, pushing himself up from the bulkhead he had been leaning up against and striding towards the toad, "What else could possibly be-"

Slippy cut the avian off without saying a word. With the press of a button, the front viewport turned opaque and the communications console's information was fed directly to the new extremely widescreen display.

"...Oh."

In the plain black text on white background of a digitized official government document, the words and pictures spilled across the visual medium. Big bold letters made up the title and subtext, while two rows of three pictures each were centered just underneath. Without going further, Falco and the rest of the assembled group could see what the purpose of the document was.

_WANTED by the CORNERIAN MILITARY_

_The following individuals have been convicted of Anarchic Conspiracy_

_against the Cornerian Government and all citizens of the Lylat System._

With one exception, each of the pilots on the bridge could pick out their headshots in the array of photographs below, printed along with their name. The Cornerian pilots occupied the top row, decreasing in rank from Bill on the left, to Linka on the right, with Rhena's picture placed in the middle. Each was clad in their dress uniform. Their pictures were clearly taken from the military's database.

The Star Fox pilots were placed below in the second row, with Fox in the leftmost position under Bill, and Slippy on the right. Their photos had apparently been obtained from the very database Miyu searched back in the Cornerian Library what seemed like years ago. In centered text, under Falco's mugshot, the message continued.

_They are considered armed and extremely dangerous. They were last seen leaving Sector X towards Katina. Their last known vessel descriptions are as follows._

_1X Cornerian EXPER Light Carrier XX1 – "Great Fox"_

_4X Cornerian EXPER All-Purpose Fighter Mk. II Arwing_

_0X to 4X Cornerian CDF Patrol Fighter_

_Reward of Live Capture : 50,000 Credits per Individual_

_Reword of Deceased Capture : 30,000 Credits per Individual_

_Contact Local Cornerian Military Recruitment Office for further information._

The message continued from there, but nothing else needed to be said for the seven pilots present. They all stared up at the viewport with slackened jaws and silent expressions. Even Fox was stirred from his mental reverie. For a moment, he had forgotten all about Peppy.

"Hey guys," Slippy said to nobody in particular, "…I don't feel so good."

Nobody responded, but they all could identify. Moments passed before someone finally broke the silence.

"Sir, we did nothing wrong," Linka said quietly, turning to Bill. "Right? They attacked _us_. How did they…why did…" The young coyote looked as though she were still weak from her encounter with the Heavy Gas on Yohan. Her eyes, however, betrayed the source of her distress. It wasn't any form of physical or mental weakness; it was fear.

The seven inhabitants of the bridge were suddenly speechless, unable to break eye contact with their own portraits (with one exception). Silent theories and personal contemplations shot around the room like lightening, crackling in the silence that permeated the crew. Color drained from their faces as their conclusions began to line up behind each other. But not a single one among them was willing to accept what logic dictated. To do that was just too much to ask. It brought up far too many questions and disturbed far too many ironclad beliefs.

And then suddenly, like a flood gate had been opened, the private theories and ideas spilled forth in rapid succession, playing off each other. Under more innocent circumstances, the clarity of the hive-mind sort of conclusion would've been something to notice in of itself.

"Those _weren't _your guys after all," Miyu began, turning towards the Cornerian pilots.

"But how does a Cornerian _Military _installation, even one as backwater as Yohan, get hijacked without anyone in command knowing?" Rhena continued, facing the lynx in response. "Someone higher up had to have noticed something happen."

"Unless whoever took over the station kept a few officers alive at gunpoint to report in and make it seem like everything was hunky-dory," Falco commented, "The depths of Sector X isn't exactly prime patrol real estate. Someone could pull off a well-covered take over like that and not be noticed for a long time."

"No, there are fail-safes for that," Bill said, shaking his head and rubbing his temples, "Silent triggers, stress words, biometrics in the communications equipment…there's too much someone outside the military wouldn't know about for them to be _using _captured officers to keep up appearances."

"So, what?" Falco replied, incredulous, "It was an inside job? Someone got paid by these yahoos to leave the back door unlocked?"

"Not just some_one_," Bill continued. At this point the rest of the room fell quiet and listened; the Cornerian pilots because of the hound's superior rank, and the StarFox pilots because it was obvious Bill was well-versed in Cornerian Military organization. "_A lot _of someones. And more importantly, at least a few someones in higher office. No, to execute something like what you're suggesting, you'd need at least an Admiral, somebody who can make deals off the radar without being immediately questioned. And that just doesn't happen."

Falco continued looking at the Flight Sergeant after he finished speaking, expectantly. A beat of silence passed as Bill realized what was being implied.

"…You're suggesting a Cornerian Fleet _Admiral _would just up and hijack a backwater station for smuggling...," Bill responded, clearly perturbed at the suggestion, "_Whatever_ the hell they had in those crates back there?"

"Soldiers," Miyu quickly filled in.

Bill heard the lynx but continued to stare at the avian who had implicitly made such a bold accusation, refusing to break his laser-focused eye contact.

Falco met his gaze evenly and folded his arms. "Is that really so hard to believe?"

"You're damn right it is!" Bill shouted in reply. The very thought of such a deception at the highest echelons of Cornerian Command was such an unspeakable transgression the hound was offended by it. That a top officer, who had served through countless battles and conflicts to achieve the rank of Admiral, who had lived the life of a dedicated solider, steadfastly loyal to both to his crew and home planet, would just _betray _everything for _any _reason…it was unthinkable. "How would he do it? What possible motive could he do it for? Think about it."

"I think I have," Falco replied, meeting Bill's stare with uncharacteristic neutrality, "What other possibility is there?"

"There has to be some other explanation," he offered weakly. But soon, Bill was silent. He couldn't think of anything. But the implications…

"They have our pictures, and the message is standard issue," Rhena said softly, taking a few steps closer to the hound, "Sir…Grey, it has to be someone in the military. There is no other possibility."

Bill glanced at his subordinate briefly like her words were an official declaration of betrayal. But he couldn't maintain the eye contact for long, and looked away. Looked down.

_I've dedicated my life to Corneria, _Bill thought, staring at the bulkhead, _And risked my life for it more times than I care to count. If someone could be corrupting the system from within…is that what I've worked for?_

Dramatic thoughts, no doubt, but not without foundation. Bill's dedication to the military ran deep, and enough people on the bridge knew that to let him take his own council for the time being. His outside manner of the generally good-humored Flight Sergeant was genuine, but beneath it ran a serious appreciation for the duties of a soldier. Every sortie, no matter how mundane or seemingly pointless, served the greater good in some sense. And to think that at least some of what he had been serving so faithfully was a farce hurt. Like the slap of a parent.

Those attuned to this, Rhena primarily, backed off and let him have his peace.

"Why isn't your picture up there?" Linka abruptly asked Miyu, nodding towards the viewscreen.

"I'm not with Star Fox," Miyu replied without thinking. The Cornerian pilot glanced down at her outfit and then back to her. The lynx shrugged at her arched eyebrow and sighed. "Long story."

But it also made Miyu realize that she had nearly forgotten everything from before the mission went sour. Her agreement with Peppy. Her take of the mission's payment. Her hatred for what the mercenary crew she had just been mistaken for being a part of had done to her. It surprised her how quickly she had glazed over it all and unconsciously considered herself invested in the current situation.

The thought suddenly hit her that she could wash her hands of the dilema. Not immediately, as what was left of her ship presumably still lay in pieces in the _Great Fox_'s hold somewhere. But the next time the carrier made port, she could literally walk away and never turn back. She'd have to swallow the pill of lost revenge, but based on what was currently displayed on the bridge's viewport, some bounty hunter somewhere would probably be willing to take up the cause. Though without a ship, or the money she had been counting on leaving Star Fox behind with in her pocket, scratching by was going to be tough for awhile. Still.

It was an intriguing thought; one she could tell deserved much more attention. She mentally filed it away for later consideration though, as a siren on the console she was leaning against suddenly sprang to life.

Miyu yelped and jolted upright, jumping away in surprise as the shrill alarm pierced the still of the bridge.

"The hell is that?" she exclaimed by reflex, vocalizing everyone's immediate reaction.

"Proximity Alarm," Fox replied softly, his voice still muffled by the hand that half-covered his jaw as it rested on his palm. He refused to be dragged from his thoughts again so easily. The vulpine cast his glance at his diminutive crewmate. "Slippy?"

"Um…," the toad replied, stumbling to Miyu's console and flipping through the long-range sensor data flooding in from the edges of the _Great Fox_'s information gathering fingertips. "We've got a Cornerian gunboat patrol approaching at extreme detection range," he continued, turning to Fox, "They're moving pretty fast."

"Ping 'em," Falco said, walking over to Slippy's chair.

"_Ping _them?" Rhena repeated with a hint of edge in her voice, "That sort of sensor system's _illegal, _merc-"

"Really? _Really._ You're going to pull _that _despite all that's happened? You're going to suddenly bring up the fact that we're not exactly straight with the law? Because according to your buddies at Cornerian High Command, so are you," Falco interrupted with force, only glancing at the wolf after he finished his sentence. He locked eyes long enough to smirk at her before turning back to the toad, bending over the console, "So how's that ping coming Slip?"

Rhena fumed silently but held her tongue.

"Just finished," Slippy replied, pointing to the proper readout on his console, "Their targeting systems have us locked as hostile targets and their weapons are fully charged."

"They're going to attack us?" Linka asked in disbelief. "What happened to com protocol?"

As if to answer her, a com window abruptly opened in the corner of the _Great Fox_'s main viewport. A uniformed canine appeared in the frame, surrounded by the cramped, three-person cockpit of the Cornerian Gunboat. His helmet displayed the chevrons of a Flight Sergeant. His expression was cold determination, half hidden by an opaque visor.

"Mercenary Vessel, this is Flight Sergeant Olson of the Cornerian Military. You are hereby ordered to power down your weapons and slave your navigation system to a frequency we will broadcast. Will you comply?"

Slippy's eyes went wide as Falco stood straight up. Every pair of eyes on the bridge was suddenly trained on the Cornerian officer. There was no way for the gunboat pilot to see them without the _Great Fox's _com system allowing him, but the entire congregation froze as if he could.

Fox's hand finally fell from his face.

This was it. If they complied, the Star Fox pilots would probably be tried and found guilty of some conjured treason charges and locked away for life. And the Cornerian pilots would almost certainly be court marshaled and shot for hostile acts towards the Cornerian Military. They would never discover who was behind the flurry of events that had just transpired, nor would they ever discover what was really going on.

And Peppy Hare would be lost forever.

But if they resisted…

"Er…Fox?" Falco said in a hushed voice, turning to face the vulpine seated in the commander's chair.

If they resisted, they would begin their lives anew.

The Cornerian Military was virtually omnipresent throughout the Lylat System. Its Armadas were easily large enough to overpower any other governing body's fleets, and its intelligence networks snaked into the deepest dives on the most backwater stations. There would be no safe place to hide; not for long periods of time anyway. They would be constantly on the run.

None of the mercenaries had many strong ties to family or friends outside Star Fox, but those they did have would have to be put indefinitely on hold, or severed altogether. Apartments on Corneria, bank accounts, every possession not aboard the _Great Fox_…would have to be sacrificed.

"Mercenary Vessel, this is your final warning. Power down and signal your surrender."

Fox glanced at Bill. Their eyes met and a brief moment passed. The Cornerian understood his team's own position in everything.

Bill and the surviving Gamma Squadron pilots would never be able to go back to their lives with the Cornerian Military. The oaths they had sworn of loyalty and brotherhood, the ideals instilled in them by their superiors…pointless. The very government they had once served so faithfully had now turned its back on them, condemning them to a wanted nomad's life, or a short, painful stay in a death-row brig.

His decision wasn't easy. But in the end it was truly the only viable option. If he was to survive long enough to discover who it was who was behind this betrayal at the highest echelons of the Cornerian Military, there was no other choice.

He slowly raised a hand to his breast pocket and unclipped the small, silver nametag. He looked at it for only a moment…

_First Flight Sergeant William Grey_

…before slipping it into the pocket and out of view.

Rhena and Linka followed suit almost immediately.

"You are now considered a hostile target Mercenary Vessel-" the Cornerian gunboat pilot began before Falco casually reached down and cut the communication channel.

"What do we do Fox?" he asked.

"What else?" Fox McCloud replied, shrugging and sitting upright. His hands were motionless and his features calm, even while his brain screamed inside.

"We run."

* * *

First of all, thank you to everyone who has remained faithful and stuck with this story through its absurd delays. That applies both to my regular reviewers and the invisible readers. You guys make this worthwhile.

And second, don't worry; I'm not stopping. But I have been thinking a lot about how I'm going to keep this thing going, and I've come to a few conclusions.

These first 18 chapters are very...lazy. I probably could have compressed the plot into 10 or 11 chapters, if not less. But early on, I really didn't want to write myself into a corner, so I erred on the opposite side and left things wide open. However, this means that now, now that I know exactly where I want to take this story, I have to tie up the unwanted loose ends. The largest of these is the sideplot with the Cornerian Officer Bishop. In future chapters, he will probably not play a major role. I know that's akin to a band messing up and stopping a live song in the middle, but the story is becoming too convoluted. He might make a return, he might not.

Also, the delays are unfortunately probably going to continue. This is a very relaxing little hobby project for me; one that I like to work on when the mood strikes me, which is usually two or three hours a week. Unfortunately, that means the handful of you who follow the story suffer. So consider this my heartfelt but blanket apology for the future: I'm sorry. A good time frame to expect is an update every month or so. However, future chapters are going to be much more plot-centric, with less meandering between plot points. You know, like how an actual story should be like =)

So consider this the end of "Part 1" to Star Fox: Mercenaries. I'm already working on "Part 2", as it were, but I wanted to put up a sort of bookend so that there's at least some bit of closure if I decide to call the whole thing off (which is very unlikely).

Thanks again everyone!

-Redd

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	19. Chapter 19: Another Day in the Life

**XIX:**_ Another Day in the Life  
_**

* * *

**

_An excerpt from the spoken journal of Fox McCloud__:_

_Things are…finally starting to settle down a little._

_Under any other circumstances, I doubt I could call a situation like this 'settling', but then again, I suppose when the entire Cornerian Navy has your face on their To-Do list, you take what peace and quiet you can._

_[Sigh/Undeterminable]_

_It's been about four weeks since our incident in Sector X; since we lost Peppy. The first seven days were tough. You know, we've never really operated strictly to the code of the law per say, but we've never had to live with one eye always on the radar, even in civilian space; hell, especially in civilian space. I dare say that we've never been actively hunted by anyone; we've never really made bad enough enemies for that._

_[Laugh/Undeterminable]_

_After our first 'encounter' with bounty hunters in the middle of the friggin' trade lane – civilian bystanders and all – we've decided that leaving the Great Fox in hiding whenever we go landside is probably the best bet. The old girl's got a famous face. We found a rusty POS shuttle for sale in a used ship's lot to this end; even taking the Arwings or those Cornerian fighters to any port before we repaint them would probably be a pretty bad idea._

_I'm honestly still surprised Bill and his pilots decided to join us. I mean, logically, I guess it makes perfect sense; 'all for one' and all that. But when it comes to military service, logic isn't usually a concern for Bill. I've tried to air out some of those emotions, but he seems content to keep them bottled up. Probably not especially healthy, especially with the weight of nine dead pilots on his shoulders, but I don't think there's really anything I can do about it._

_[Pause/Idle]_

_He's set up shop in the ship's medical bay, which is frankly quite a stroke of luck; with Peppy missing and ROB out of commission pretty much indefinitely, I was getting a little worried about that whole situation. It'll be interesting to see if his original major as a Field Medic in the Academy will show through at all. Either way, I'm just glad he's amongst friends here. He knows Falco and I would do anything for him._

_Speaking of which, Falco seems to be taking this transition to wanted criminal-hood disturbingly well. For the few contracts we've managed to score just to keep us afloat he's been sharper than any time since the Lylat War. Hm…maybe that's it. Maybe he just responds well to the pressure of half the Lylat System hunting our collective tail. Of course, it's never just one thing that changes with him. Rhena and Falco have been at each other's throats since that first day._

_[Laugh/Undeterminable]_

_Hell, it's usually for nothing more than a snide remark, but whatever the reason, they just can't stand each other. Though, and maybe I'm just imagining it…I think they both secretly like it. I mean, I'm pretty sure it took Rhena all of five minutes to catch on to the fact that Falco's just naturally an ass to most people. Maybe she just likes messing with people like him. She's an interesting case though. She's got all the primp and pomp of a dedicated soldier, but the appearance of someone straight out of the ancient history books. Tattoos, dyed hair, muttering what I can only guess is a native language to herself…hm. I should probably ask Bill about that. I'm sure there's something fascinating going on there._

_Hm. The kid, Linka, has been pretty quiet. Not as bad as those first few days, but coming out of her shell has been gradual. Bill says she's sixteen years old, which makes me wonder just how lax Cornerian recruitment is these days…but she's alive, which means I can't doubt her skill with a fighter craft. Still, even though I'm only four years older, I feel like this whole lifestyle might be a little much for her. Based on how she interacts with us, I can only guess that she never really had much of a social life; or much of any life, for that matter. And now she's on the run from the government. _

_[Sigh/Undeterminable]_

_It's kinda sad, to be honest. I have caught her hanging around Slippy a few times actually, usually just sitting in the same room as him without saying anything while he babbles on about some piece of hardware or another. It's almost cute…ya know, in an eerie sort of way._

_And it's probably good for Slip, too. After Peppy was…well, captured, Slippy fell into this slump; it was like that concussion decided to resurface all of a sudden. No energy, no enthusiasm…I think he blamed himself for losing the old hare. Its good he snapped out of it though; no sense brooding over things he had no control over. _

_[Laugh/Undeterminable]_

_That's my job._

_Eh…and we dropped Miyu off as soon as we reached our first Freeport, per her request. Haven't heard from her since. Good riddance._

_But…

* * *

_

…_Has it really been a month?_

The patrons of the Old Block bar ebbed and flowed around them like a sea of life and vigor.

Choirs of half drunken toasts and enthusiastic cries of celebration nearly drowned out the driving background music. The classic antiques and traditional wall paraphernalia of the normally quiet establishment clashed with hastily erected neon lights and flashing strobes. It was the weekly 'Midnight Happy Hour' at the bar, and the place was flooded with every type of young adult one could imagine. The few regulars who stuck it out with the new and unusual crowd voluntarily kept to themselves in quiet booths.

The two were almost conspicuous in how much they dressed to fit in with the rest of the young throng. The man's loose-fitting, unbuttoned green shirt billowed aside as he turned sideways to slip past another customer, revealing a tight grey undershirt beneath. His belted jeans ran down to a pair of old, well worn sneakers. A pair of trendy shades lay perched above his forehead. He finally caught sight of his destination as he placed a hand on another kid's back, gently guiding him aside.

In his wake followed who one could only assume to be his date. She was shorter by a head but held herself confidently, staying close behind the hound leading her. She made long strides in her modest heels and tight-fitting jeans, which ran up to a stylish red blouse and black jacket. Despite her business-like demeanor and obvious connection to the one leading her, she caught the occasional male patron giving her the once over as she proceeded. Although it could have just been her hair.

…_Seems like it was just yesterday everything happened…_

A small booth nestled in a back corner of the Old Block was occupied by a single man. Based on his dress, age, and general scowling attitude towards the amount of younger people present, he was clearly one of the normal patrons of the tavern. He was nursing a glass of amber liquid and apparently deep in thought as he idly scanned the crowd. When he made eye contact with the hound and wolf headed his way, he made no indication of acknowledgement; he only kept his eyes on them.

And that was enough for the male hound. He immediately set his course towards the table and reached back, grasping his date's hand as they passed a particularly rowdy bunch of customers.

…_I haven't forgotten about you Peppy; don't even think it…_

They finally reached the table and sat down without a word. The music of the bar faded from classic distorted strings to a popular thumbing club beat, and the crowded floor cheered and abruptly began shifting with the familiar bass. If the three beings at the table offered any form of verbal greeting to each other, there was no way to hear it.

The man stared at the young couple across from him for a long few moments, somehow sizing them up without ever breaking eye contact. For their part, the couple returned his gaze. They sat in silence as the bar pulsed around them.

…_This guy better come through._

Fox McCloud watched the meeting through a scope. A second story loft across the road offered the perfect view of the meeting through the Old Block's large, panoramic street-side windows. Recessed from sight in the black, lightless apartment, he was completely hidden to all but the most observant of pedestrians on the busy city sidewalk running past the bar. Even then, all they would be able to catch would be the occasional flash of the streetlights off what could barely be seen as a long, thin metal barrel.

For a full minute, it appeared as though neither side of the table in question in the Old Block spoke, or made any move to break the silence. Fox was just beginning to worry that something had gone wrong when the older man finally offered a fresh, lopsided scowl and brought a hand up from under the table. In it was a small, square datadisk, which he placed flat on the table. His lips then began moving, but there was no way Fox could hope to hear what was being said.

The vulpine whispered into the microphone that extended halfway down his jaw, attached to an earpiece. A pair of responses, one flippant and male, and the other young and female, sounded off in reply.

Down below Fox's line of sight, across the bar on the same side of the street as the observation loft, an avian in a vintage leather jacket and rough-looking pants leaned against the side of a building, casually scanning the street. To anyone else, it looked like he was waiting to meet some friends. It would require close inspection to notice that the raptor wore an earpiece similar to Fox's, and sported a bulge in his jacket just large enough for a handgun holster.

Through Fox's scope, the backs of the couple's heads nodded in agreement with the old man, and the girl picked up a disk from the table. She replaced it with a scrap of paper with some numbers scrawled on it, and slid it back towards the patron. They stood to leave as the man took another sip of his drink, never losing his serious demeanor. They shared a few parting words before the pair began threading their way back through the crowd.

The hound casually looked out the window of the bar as they went, towards the observer only he knew was there, and nodded once.

Fox caught the sign and again whispered into his earpiece. Only the female voice replied this time.

As the couple reached the doors and emerged into the chilled city night, a car rounded the block, pulling to a halt in front of the bar. A young coyote was alone in the vehicle at the wheel. Without looking around, the man opened the back door of the car and let his date enter first, after which he too got in and closed the door.

Once the car, now two passengers heavier, began to pull away from the Old Block, Fox quickly stood and began disassembling his long-barreled weapon. He placed each piece into its specific place in a fitted briefcase, taking care to make sure the components fit snuggly into their molds. He closed the briefcase with a snap_._

Quickly scanning the area he was sitting, he sprayed the chair down with fast drying scent cleanser. He then padded carefully out of the room, making sure he didn't leave any bootprints or other trace of his presence in the apartment. The owners could be home soon.

Suitcase in hand, he made his way down hallways and a stairwell devoid of life. He emerged into a back alley where the same car that picked up the couple was waiting for him. Fox climbed into the passenger seat, and the car pulled out onto the street, and into the night.

* * *

Falco Lombardi watched the vehicle pull around the block and out of sight. He knew, somewhere in an empty apartment above him, Fox was packing up. But he also knew he, on the other hand, had no reason to move. He still had a good ten minutes of rear-guard observation as the rest of his friends made their way to a safe house nearby. Bounties didn't disappear with time, and bounty hunters were an opportunistic bunch. It paid to be careful.

The meeting had apparently gone off without a hitch; the contact was exactly where he said he'd be, there was no obvious outside observation, nor was there any suspicious 'bystander' interactions. It was clean. By the book.

Which is why it didn't feel right. Falco couldn't quite put a finger on it…but his gut told him something was going on. Someone was watching. Someone…

'_I knew it_.'

A young woman slipped out the front door of the bar as a group of patrons pushed in. She immediately looked in the direction the car had left in, and let her gaze linger for a bit longer than she probably should have. There was nothing of interest in that direction, leaving only one reason why she would be so interested so quickly.

Falco smirked as the copper-hued girl began walking down the sidewalk in the same direction as the vehicle. Her black cocktail dress offered little protection from the breezy temperature, and she crossed her arms as she walked. The way she hefted her handbag, and the way her body moved in regards to it told the avian everything he needed. She was packing.

He unfolded his arms and shoved them into the pockets of his leather jacket, following parallel and behind her across the street, careful to keep a casual stride. He whispered a quick message into his microphone.

Her stride slowed as she reached the first intersection, indicating to the avian that she was about to cross to his side of the street. He quickly ducked into a shadowed alcove, one he knew - from casing the bar and its surroundings - would lead to a narrow back alley. Which would lead to the wider alley behind the apartment building Fox had been watching from. The one the car had pulled into. The one he knew she was heading towards.

Falco jumped a fence and jogged in the darkness, his body just thin enough to run comfortably between the two brick buildings. The walls were dull and grimy from years of disrepair, and his jacket caught on a few snags. His boots occasionally splashed in shallow puddles of mucky standing water. He reached another fence and ably vaulted it, emerging into the larger alley.

The back alley wasn't a much prettier sight. Trash dumpsters and broken bottles and debris littered the space; it was a surprise the car had pulled away from Fox's pickup without a flat tire or scratched paint. A single, dim light was mounted atop the rear entrance to the apartment building, providing only a minimum of dirty, yellowish light.

Falco quickly sized up the alley and settled on a dumpster close to the surface street. The garbage container was filled to overflowing, producing a large pile of trash and rotting cardboard boxes against the opposite wall. The surplus refuse was arranged in a way that one could hide behind it just as easily as the dumpster. Pulling his weapon from its holster, he trotted to the trash receptacle and crouched behind it, his back to the rusty metal. From the same holster he pulled a small metal tube and began screwing it onto the barrel of his handgun. And he waited.

He didn't have to wait long. Within a minute he heard the clicking of high-heeled shoes approaching the alley along the sidewalk. The clicking slowed and stopped altogether on the other side of the dumpster. There was silence.

Falco put himself in the girl's shoes and imagined what she was thinking.

'_Doesn't look like anyone's here_…' he thought, his mind's voice taking on a stereotypically high-pitched tone. He smirked. '_I should probably look for clues. I definitely saw the car pull in here. But…what if someone's hiding back here?'_

Falco heard a footstep and a tiny, metallic _clink_.

'_Well, I'll just open my knock-off designer handbag and grab my pepper spray and whistle…I mean my gun...'_

Falco caught the distinct sound of a small chamber being cocked.

'_Er, definitely gun. Then I'll just creep forward…'_

More footsteps. They neared his dumpster.

The illumination from the streetlights at the head of the alley cast her shadow where Falco could see it. He could've reached out and touched it if he wanted. But he waited as she crept forward.

Careful to remain silent, he edged towards the wall of the alley, making sure he wouldn't be caught in her peripheral as she visually swept the trash pile. He crouched on the balls of his feet and braced himself for when she rounded the dumpster. If he was lucky, she'd have her back to him. If not…

Her silhouette came into view. He was lucky.

Falco hurled himself into her without a sound save the flutter of fabric, tackling the girl into the pile of trash. She yelped and struggled but he quickly recovered and got a knee on the upper portion of her bare back, twisting a small, holdout-style pistol out of her hand.

"Holy shit, it worked!" he couldn't help but remark out loud. He jabbed the silencer of his own pistol into the back of her neck and waited. She shut up and lay still almost immediately. He glanced momentarily at her weapon before looking at the back of her head. "You were going to shoot me with an _unsilenced _weapon? In the _city_? Are you out of your _mind_?"

Her fur had been dyed a coppery red, obscuring the natural brown beneath. But not the black accent markings. Her ears sported several additional piercings, but were naturally slim and looked sharpened to a point. Falco grabbed her arm, twisting it behind her back and bringing it into the dim light of the alley. Scars. Unique scars. Familiar scars.

'…_Oh get right outta here.'_

"I don't know who you are, but if you try _anything_, you're going to lose it _so_ fast-" she began through clenched teeth, muffled by the trash bags pressed into her face.

"Relax kitty," he said, lifting his knee and standing up, lowering his gun to his side. "You've got nothing to worry about. Besides, I know your claws well enough."

Falco smirked as she carefully got to her feet and adjusted herself before turning to face him. "Well, actually, _Fox_ knows a little more than I-"

His vision flashed as a fist smashed into his temple. He stumbled back a few steps as she stepped forward, but he raised his gun immediately, halting her advance.

"Guh," he groaned, shaking his head clear and glaring at her. His smirk was gone. "Okay, now _that _was uncalled for."

She stood, frozen in mid strike by Falco's pistol. He retreated another step when she refused to step back herself. They stared at each other for what felt like a long time.

Falco was waiting for a flash of recognition to come over her face, but it never did. He then realized she already knew full well who he was, and maintained her scowl _because_ of it.

"Still pissed about the whole 'us saving your life' thing, eh," he stated more than questioned. He pocketed her holdout pistol. "We let you go a month ago, just like you wanted. Why are you still following us?"

She relaxed her stance but offered no answer.

"…Alright then," Falco continued, undeterred. "You had your shot. Now, I'm gonna leave, and I don't want you following, okay? I'm not afraid to fire this you know."

To illustrate his point, he whipped his gun behind him and fired a round, sending the slug pinging off the alley walls. The pistol's silencer did its job though, and the only evidence the gun had been fired was the bullet itself.

"Nobody would hear," he finished, and began stepping backwards. Miyu didn't follow.

Once he put some more strides between himself and her, Falco turned around and holstered his pistol in his jacket. He shoved his hands in his pockets and made his way towards the opposite entrance to the alley, headed for the surface street. The avian had no reason to be concerned about the lynx; he had taken her only weapon, and even if she kicked her heels off, he'd hear her approaching him. He had quite a story to tell the crew once he made it to the safe house.

"I want in," she called out as he reached the street.

He stopped and turned around.

"What?"

"I want in," she repeated, stepping forward a few times as she spoke, "I know you guys have been getting jobs, and I know you're a semi-reliable team. Well…I want in."

Falco sighed, not stepping towards her but not retreating either. Again, they stared at each other for a long few moments. "…You could've just sent us a message, you know."

"I tried," she responded. "But you've stayed off the grid pretty well. And your public message accounts are being watched, so you're not going to be checking them anyhow." She got a nod from the raptor in reply.

Falco whispered into his earpiece, giving his team an update on how he was doing. His conversation partner on the other side of the connection was incredulous, so he repeated a few lines, along with a query. The answer he got to the question he asked apparently disappointed him, as his shoulders slumped and his posture slackened.

She had approached a few more steps in the meantime.

Falco sighed again.

"Alright," he began, walking to meet her with purpose and intentionally stopping just a little too close. "For whatever reason, they trust you. Personally, I think you're working for a friggin' bounty agency, but that's beside the point. The kid's gonna bring the car back around in ten minutes or so…think you can sit and be quiet until then?"

Miyu looked down at the grimy, wet alley pavement beneath her, then to her limited, fairly revealing clothes, then finally back at Falco. Her gaze was withering and fully embodied by a single, unspoken remark. _Really?_

The avian made his way to the stoop at the rear entrance to the apartment building and sat down. He caught her look and waved his hand dismissively. "…Or stand. Whatever."

* * *

Linka Pyrokanzia pulled into an open space on the sidewalk outside a dimly lit motel, sliding into the slot without too much trouble. The car powered down and the headlights faded to black, leaving only the faint streetlights outside the building for illumination. The street was nearly devoid of life in this area of the city; nobody would see them. Or if they did, they probably wouldn't care. Most knew it as a sector where few questions were asked, and fewer answers were given.

Linka opened her door and stepped into the street, stretching and casually casting her gaze around the immediate vicinity. The coyote's clothing, like Falco's, was entirely casual; loose jeans and unremarkable sports shoes complemented a jacket and undershirt that swung only slightly to the feminine side of the fashion spectrum. It was more her style, to be fair, and less for the meeting. She walked around the front of the vehicle to the sidewalk where she met Falco pulling Miyu out of the backseat.

Walking in the opposite direction on the city pathway was a limping wolf, covered by a dirty trenchcoat. What could be seen of his fur was matted and covered in grime. His face was shaded by a wide brimmed hat, casting a shadow from the streetlights over his features. But what couldn't be made out physically could easily be determined verbally. The bum was muttering to himself.

The coyote hesitated for a moment until he passed. It was a fairly common sight in the more remote regions of the city, but she never quite got over the sense of paranoia it caused in her. The car door opening pricked her ears though, and she refocused her attention. As the lynx emerged, Linka couldn't help a stifled laugh from escaping.

"Was the blindfold really necessary?" she asked Falco, grinning. "I mean with her dress and those handcuffs, you two could pass as one of those adventurous coup-"

"Ah, ah, yeah," Falco interrupted, finally getting Miyu out and closing the door behind them. "That's enough outta you, kid."

Linka chuckled and followed the two up the open-air stairs to their motel room.

The temperature had dropped at a slow but steady rate since the whole operation began earlier in the night, and a slight breeze carried with it a brisk chill. They reached the second story and began passing rooms. Occasionally, the street side window would be illuminated, indicating occupation, but the blinds were always drawn. They reached their destination at the end of the long row of rooms. Falco rapped on the door with his knuckles.

Fox answered the door with a drawn pistol in his hand.

'_Like a good merc,'_ Linka thought.

The vulpine stepped aside and let the party of three through, closing the door and locking it behind them.

The room was pleasantly lit by a collection of table lamps and decorated with an almost impressive flare of plainness. Generic paintings hung on the walls, and standard patterns made up the bed covers and wallpaper. It was the quintessential hideaway for any number of activities. The equipment spread out on the desks and beds would give one a good clue as to which particular activity had been performed recently.

Bill Grey sat behind the desk, the holographic projections of his laptop computer glowing in the ample light. The digital figures and shapes were suspended between two projector poles that extended about a foot above what otherwise amounted to just a keyboard. The hound was crunching the data contained within the disk they had obtained during the meeting at the Old Block bar, relaying information to his 'date', who sat across from him with a similar computer.

Rhena Haggerty was furiously typing and sorting information as Bill passed it on to her, either verbally or through a data connection between their two computers. Her jacket was spread across the back of her chair and the dusk-hued wolf had her recently cut, bright orange and red hair in a tight ponytail. Her demeanor was entirely business. As usual.

On one of the beds lay the suitcase containing Fox's sniper rifle, as well as a few pieces of communication equipment. A second, boxier metallic case lay open on the second bed, displaying a half-dozen small arms of various makes and sizes. The rifles were recognizably Cornerian, kept after the group's escape from Yohan Depot a month prior. The others had been obtained since.

"What did I tell you about picking up strays," Fox remarked, already knowing who the lynx was thanks to Falco's report over the com.

"Just thought I could do something about the overwhelming scent of canine in here," Falco replied, leading Miyu to an unused arm chair in the far corner of the small room. As she sat down, still cuffed and blindfolded, Falco looked around the room at the four other occupants.

Fox and Bill looked at each other and smirked.

"Why were you shadowing us, Miyu?" Fox asked, walking up to the lynx and sitting on the bed opposite her. "We let you go back on Riley a month ago. You _asked _us to."

She began. "I-"

"Are you here for the bounty?" Fox interrupted, cocking his head to the side, even though she couldn't see it. "Or more of that revenge fantasy you love so much?"

Miyu's lips curled into a snarl and she twisted her head to the side.

"I-" she began again.

"Because I'll be honest," Fox continued, cutting her off and snatching off her blindfold, "I'm getting pretty confused by how every time we let you go, in good, honest faith, you come sneaking back into our lives. Usually precipitated by a nice black-eye or two."

The vulpine gestured to Falco, whose cheek was sporting a noticeably darker splotch from the punch he took from her to the face. The wounds Fox had referred to on his own face had since healed.

He shrugged. "Now granted, he probably deserved it…but seriously now Miyu; why are you here?"

Miyu said nothing for a long moment, her azure eyes drilling deep holes into Fox's gaze. The room suddenly took on a simmering air. It gained tension in the manner of a string slowly being tautened until shaking from the pressure. Equal and opposite forces battle over the thread, refusing to loosen their grip until in one instant, when the breaking point is reached and crossed, the string snaps.

The window shattered as a grenade punched through the glass, soaring into the room on a trail of thick, billowing smoke.

* * *

The wolf watched as a car pulled up to the motel. He stayed in the shadows of a nearby alley until the driver emerged from the far side of the vehicle.

It was a young girl, no older than sixteen. The coyote's facial features were highlighted in the headlights of her car as she walked around the front of it. White tipped ears. Burning blue eyes. Gold fur.

It was one of the targets alright. The informant had come through.

But the wolf had to be sure.

Stuffing the small stack of six pictures in the pocket of his muddied coat, he stumbled into the light of the sidewalk, angling towards the car for a closer look. He began muttering incoherently, knowing a silent observer would probably tip the mark off. The guise of a common street bum was just as much verbal as it was a dirty jacket, after all.

The girl looked at him briefly as he passed, just long enough for the wolf to confirm his suspicions. A raptor and a lynx got out of the back of the car; the former he recognized. The latter looked to be a future, unlucky bystander.

Once he got out of earshot, the wolf's gibberish suddenly became coherent as he began speaking into a com unit hidden in his coat's collar.

* * *

Bill instinctively kicked the canister towards the open bathroom door. It banked off the frame and into the dark space, spewing more of the snow white vapors as it went. He rushed forward and yanked the bathroom door shut. That would buy a few seconds.

Falco snatched up a rifle from the open box on the bed and tossed it to Bill. He tossed another to Fox as Rhena slammed the projectors on the laptop computers shut, packing them into shoulder bags.

The room was a flurry of activity for a few moments as the occupants rushed to pack everything valuable. A muffled _whump _and shouts from outside the broken window were followed by another smoking canister that landed under Miyu's chair.

She glared at it for an instant before it started unloading smoke, and then she was up out of the seat. Forgetting her hands were still tied though, she misjudged her gait and flopped down onto the bed, burying her face in the fabric.

Amidst the whirlwind, Linka stood still, overcome by panic. She was never one to lose her nerve easily, but she had also never been conscious for a siege of the sort that was sure to soon follow. The coyote began breathing heavy, her lungs grasping for oxygen in the air that was rapidly filling with smoke.

"Ceepees?" Fox called out, ratcheting his rifle and jumping towards the door that connected their room to the room next door. He reared back on one leg and thrust his other foot into the doorknob. When that failed, he did it again. And again.

"Police or Military would've offered surrender first," Rhena replied, shoving the second laptop into her bag and slinging it over her shoulder. The room was quickly becoming opaque. "Recent policy change."

"Bounty Hunters," Falco barked grabbing the sniper rifle's briefcase in one hand and a final rifle from the other open case. He looked briefly at Miyu, flailing to right herself on the bed. "Bitch led 'em here."

Fox finally broke through the old lock and the door gave way under the weight of his boot. He charged into the adjacent room, ignoring the screaming of a woman in one of the beds. Rhena and Bill quickly followed.

Falco stopped at the threshold and looked back.

Linka was shaking and frozen, a look of utter confusion plastered across her face. Miyu was kneeling on the floor, but quickly got to her feet and charged past the momentarily distracted avian. He ignored the lynx and ran to the coyote, grabbing her upper arm and shoving her towards the open door.

"Let's go kid," he yelled with a bit of annoyance, following behind her into the adjacent room.

Fox quickly unlocked the exit in the other room, knowing at that very moment an entry team was probably stacking up to break into their former hovel. As he shoved the door open and charged into the cold air of the city, he wasn't disappointed.

A small squad of roughly dressed gunmen had just kicked down the door to the mercenaries' room when Fox caught sight of them out of his peripheral. By some stroke of luck, none of them noticed him emerge next door as they filed quickly inside, firing wildly into the billowing and utterly obscuring smoke.

Fox waited for an instant until they had all left the balcony before he rapidly scanned the streets below and took off running towards the stairs. The rest of his team, plus Miyu, quickly followed. Falco and Linka brought up the rear.

As Fox reached the stairwell, he was suddenly aware of the T-intersection his destination was a part of. He reached the cross point just as a black-clad bounty hunter came running from the other direction.

Acting on instinct, Fox smashed the butt of his rifle into the man's face, cutting his startled yelp short and sending him crashing to the ground. The mercenary carried through and continued to the stairs without slowing his stride, taking them three at a time as he and his followers descended to the street level.

He knew their car would undoubtedly be sabotaged in some way, so once on the sidewalk outside the motel, he immediately scanned for a parked car large enough for his crew. Unfortunately, the bounty hunters found them first.

A wolf sporting a dirty trench coat ran up to the balcony railing on the second floor, catching Fox's attention.

The two stared at each other for only an instant before the wolf called out. But before he ducked back from the railing, dodging Bill's bullets, Fox caught his facial features. A stripe of white fur ran laterally across his face, connecting his eyes like the mask of a badger. The shock of hair that those of the lupine species usually sported was a deep yellowish blond. His eyes were those of a predator.

His call spawned several more bounty hunters from other locations around the motel, and was soon followed by pounding feet as they relocated.

"This way!" Bill called out, sprinting across the street towards a dark alleyway. The rest of the group followed, himself and the three other combat-ready members stopping occasionally to provide covering fire back towards the motel.

The street was devoid of life. Bullets began pinging off the dirty concrete as they reached the opposite sidewalk and continued into the alley.

Their labored breaths and pounding boots, and one pair of heels, were the only sounds in the darkness of the backstreet. The canine at the head of the line of mercenaries ducked down a connecting alley as soon as he could in order to get out of the line of sight of the motel. That turn was followed by another, and soon another as the group navigated the maze of the city's layout, refusing to approach any surface street. The gruff voices on their rear were slowly becoming fainter as they pressed on.

Miyu struggled to keep up, and often had to stop and listen for their footfalls as she lost them at another intersection. She finally gave up and kicked off her heels, leaving them behind in a dirty puddle. Her hands were still tied behind her back though, and she was fast becoming frustrated.

She rounded another corner and just barely caught sight of Linka's tail disappearing behind an intersecting alley. The lynx charged on in pursuit, but nearly ran into the young coyote standing still with the rest of the Star Fox team. They had reached a dead end.

Fox saw her and rolled his eyes, but said nothing. Distant shouts were quickly approaching.

"Ideas?" he asked, catching his breath.

"Back the way we came," Falco offered, jabbing a thumb in that direction, "Find another route."

"Better idea," Bill said as he slung his rifle, moving to the center of the alley and kicking aside an old newspaper. His boot revealed a rusted manhole lid. "Falco, give me a hand."

The raptor complied and the two men pried the slab of iron away, revealing a thin ladder of pegs embedded in the circular concrete shaft. It stretched down into darkness.

"Yeah, that's the sewers alright," Falco quipped, peering over the hole's lip. "Good to know. Now how about going back the way we came?"

Bill didn't respond as he turned around and eased into the entry shaft, pausing once his head was level with the ground around it. The pegs were holding firm, though they were sheathed in a layer of perpetual moisture from their environment.

"Flashlight?" he asked, ignoring Falco and beseeching Rhena. The wolf fished a tiny pocket torch from one of the computer bags she was holding and handed it to him. "Thanks much," he responded, and continued his descent.

The pursuing voices grew closer.

"Whoa, whoa, hold on," Falco protested as Rhena followed the hound down the hole, careful to keep the fragile machines in her shoulder bags from jostling too much. "We're going _down _there?"

Linka was next, silent but having regained her composure from before. Soon her head disappeared from the dim ambient light of the alley into the darkness of the access shaft.

"Of course we are," Fox finally responded, stepping into the hole. "Unless you want to wait for-"

"Hey, hold up!" Miyu shouted, running up to the two mercenaries. "I can't go down there unless you untie me."

Fox looked at her and then Falco, and then back at her. "I know." He then continued down another step after grabbing the sniper rifle's briefcase from Falco.

"Don't worry," Falco added, "Your friends won't hurt _you_."

"I didn't lead them to you!" she insisted with exasperation, "I don't even know who they are!"

Fox sighed and looked her in the eyes. He could make out the voices rapidly approaching by now.

"They went this way!"

"Over here!"

"Not the street, not the street!"

Finally, he rolled his eyes again and continued descending the ladder. He was completely gone from view when his voice echoed back up the shaft.

"Cut her free Falco."

Falco groaned and stood up, flipping open his pocket knife and cutting the cord wrapped around the lynx's wrists. She was descending the access ladder before he even closed his blade.

"Unbelievable," he muttered under his breath as he got in after her, sliding the heavy cover back in place over his head once he was clear. It fell flush with the ground with a heavy _thud _that echoed through the tunnel.

* * *

A/N

And...we're off. And we broke 4,000 views (4,118 to be exact)! Woot!

Artistic Tuba: Aha! Punto por el...um, me.

RedBay: Well thank you RB; I appreciate it. Now, first of all, I should clarify that meant to say Hartford when I said Bishop in the A/N of the last chapter. As a way of illustrating my point, I guess it had been so long since I used those characters that I forgot who was who. Interesting theory you have there by the way... ;]

graystripe: Alright; glad to hear it! Can do.

AndrossKenobi: Hm...you know, that's a good point. Thank for the kind words there AK.

The Broken Wolf: Heheh, I've gotta admit, the language of your reviews always makes me smile. You've got a way with words my friend. Thanks for the advice Wolf; I'll keep that in mind :]

As always, thank you for reading the latest chapter of my story. And should the fancy strike you, let me know what you think! As you can see, I always read and reply to my reviews.

~Irish Redd


	20. Chapter 20: Confession

**XX**: _Confession_

* * *

"Oh _come on_; you guys are nothing compared to Andross-"

Peppy shuddered as another jolt of electricity ripped through his battered body, sending it into a series of convulsions that lasted for a few seconds after the power was cut. He finally hung limp in his chain restraints with a rattle, the cold metal drawing tight around his wrists and ankles. His wrists were scared and bleeding from the rough chafe of the rusty metal. Coughs escaped his lungs like a broken vehicle trying desperately to start.

But he smiled all the while.

"Beh…Better…" he admitted, catching his breath, "…better. But still…disappoint-"

Another shock of current flooded through him, cutting him off. A spotlight trained directly on him from above was the only illumination in the otherwise pitch black room. So while Peppy couldn't see anyone, he could imagine a frustrated technician somewhere trying to coax more juice out of a power source. Even as volts coursed through his veins.

Peppy smelled ozone, and tasted iron. He tried to grit his teeth through the spasms.

* * *

"I recognized that wolf you know."

The main sewer tunnel was completely dark save a single probing flashlight. It was kept more or less steady on the thin ledge that ran parallel and adjacent to the primary sewage stream. The thin shaft of light only revealed the rough, unspeakably scummy surface in a tiny diameter, but it was enough to navigate by.

At least for Bill in front. The rest who were following him had to more or less take his word for it.

The river of waste was filled just about to the lip of the ledge they were walking along, occasionally sloshing over the edge when a nearby side-duct would spew more liquid of an extremely unsanitary nature into the mix. The smell would've been unbearable had their lives not depended on the escape route. The vaulted ceiling didn't help either; its curve started far too early on the sides, forcing the six to bend and move in a half-crouching manner.

"Oh yeah?" Fox replied, literally unable to turn to face the speaker behind him in line on the narrow ledge. "So you _did _know who those guys were."

"…Yeah," Miyu replied reluctantly. She grimaced as her bare feet splashed in another puddle of liquid, the makeup of which belonging to the category of things she'd be perfectly fine not knowing. "I used to work for him and his crew back before I ran into you guys."

"Literally," Falco quipped from behind her.

"His _name_'s Richard Keelik," she continued, ignoring the avian, "He's a lieutenant in the Black Star smuggling ring in Meteos."

"Black Star?" Rhena repeated from near the front of column. "We're pretty familiar with them."

"You can bet they're probably pretty familiar with you as well," Miyu replied, speaking louder this time to intentionally reach everyone in the group, "In fact, I'm not surprised that they're hot for your scent. All of you guys traveling together with pretty hefty bounties on your heads, and all of you having inconvenienced them at one point or another."

"So they know who we are too, then," Fox stated, referring to himself and the original Star Fox crew.

Miyu made an affirmative sound. "In fact, it's probably likely that Keelik took the whole ordeal in the Briar Pocket personally, since he ordered the raid himself."

"So you're saying we can probably expect to see more of him," Falco said, taking a shuffle step forward as he heard the quiet splash of his boots stepping in a puddle.

"Definitely."

"Great," Fox sighed, "The last thing we need right now is a bounty hunter with a vendetta complex."

"Yeah," Falco agreed, "Give him our regards when you report in."

"For the last time birdie, I am _not _working for him," Miyu said with an edge. There was a period of silence as the group stumbled along. Finally she breathed out and reluctantly dragged more words from her throat, "…though I can see where it might look suspic-"

"Damn straight it does," Falco interjected, his voice echoing off the sewer walls.

Miyu opened her mouth to reply, but closed it again, thinking better of it. There was no convincing the avian, and she knew it. Fox was in charge, and the vulpine seemed content to let her follow them for the time being. Best to let the issue slide.

The six continued on in silence. As their vision gradually adjusted to the low ambient light given off by Bill's flashlight, they noticed that the walls were slowly becoming less and less discolored. In addition, the few pieces of metal equipment they passed were more and more likely to be lacking in the dull brown hue of rust.

"We're getting further from the population center," Bill concluded.

He slowed to a stop in front of a slim step ladder, leading to a surface manhole similar to the one they had entered the underground ducts through. Pinpoints of dim light pierced the darkness left by the tiny flashlight. An unspoken question was asked when Bill turned to face the group, nodding up in the direction of the exit.

"I vote we take it," Linka spoke up when nobody else would, "You guys are starting to reek."

* * *

The taxi driver was understandably put off by the smell of the party of six people he picked up near the outskirts of the city, but a quick flash of a stack of credits by the fox changed his disposition. His van was big enough to hold the group, and they stayed pretty quiet for the most part. His favorite type of customers.

The aging leopard wished he could say the same about their destination. The fox with the credits had told him to drop them off at a street corner in a medium sized town some two hundred kilometers away. Clinking more credit chips onto the initial stack, the vulpine had somehow gotten the leopard to agree to take them, but even so, it was going to be a long drive.

At least they were quiet.

But that smell! If he didn't know better, the driver would venture to guess that they had just emerged from a night of spelunking in the sewers, or some similarly putrid excursion.

An early morning radio program was playing soft jazz as a smooth voice crooned over it. The streetlights thinned out and stopped altogether as the taxi raced on into open country. Very few vehicles occupied the motorway, and the kilometers passed without interruption. All the while, the sky brightened ever so slightly, and as it did, so did the attitudes of the passengers.

A little over forty minutes later, the taxi van pulled to halt at a nearly empty street corner in the destination town. The fox in the front passenger seat pulled a number of high value credit chips and splayed them out in his hand, selecting three of the fifty-credit denominations. He handed them to the leopard as his friends exited, grasping the driver's hand and shaking it firmly. His words of thanks seemed sincere.

The leopard decided that he liked the fox. His respectful, if distant, manner was a nice change from the curt or non-existent courtesies offered by peers of his age. His eye contact was direct but friendly, and almost weary.

Also, the tip was a full fifty credits more than it should have been.

Good man.

* * *

"Smaller starports care less," Fox shrugged as he switched on the autopilot of the cramped shuttle, toggling the tab and spinning in his chair to face Miyu.

"They don't even ask for a picture ID though?" she continued, learning against the bulkhead. "I thought that was standard procedure."

"They…just care less," Fox smirked, hinting at information he didn't want to share, "Let's just leave it at that."

The shuttle's interior space was a single room, containing no more floor space than a standard sized bedroom. The metal plates on the floor were worn and discolored, matching the walls caked with a layer of sheer age. Loose couplings and pipes spotted the bulkhead partitions between air and pure vacuum, and a faint smell of mildew hovered persistently.

The used ship's salesman was generous in the deal he gave the Star Fox team, but even then, it was doubtful they got their money's worth.

A large viewport in front of the vaguely egg-shaped vessel showed an open field of stars, with faint specs of dust in the distance giving the Meteos asteroid field's presence away. The pilot's seat was placed in the middle of this viewport, in front of a navigation console that was easily two or three technological generations old. The pilot's stick was moving by itself, self correcting the vessel's course as tiny inefficiencies in the shuttle's robust engines threw it askew.

Fox spun further in his pilot's chair, facing the only other chair onboard. "How'd we make out Billy?"

"Eh…," Bill cringed from the copilot's chair. He shrugged. "That depends on what your standards are. We got all the information out okay. Er, right?"

"Yep," Rhena answered, quickly examining a laptop she pulled from one of the shoulder bags. She nodded at Bill's inquisition.

"Yeah, so got that out okay," the hound continued. "But other than the weapons we grabbed on the way, we lost everything else. Com equipment, most of the guns…assorted changes of clothes."

Fox looked around and smiled. Half the people onboard the shuttle could have passed for a group of late-night clubbers the morning after, if they had run into some armed thugs at some point while club-hopping.

Bill's open shirt was dark with sweat and whatever substances they came across in the sewers. Rhena's blouse sported the burns, scars and bullet holes of a rear-guard under fire. Miyu's shoes were completely absent. The other three's more casual clothes were less conspicuous, but even then they showed the signs of a night on the run.

"Well the information is what really matters," Fox admitted, "As long as we got that, I'd consider the night a success."

"Another job?" Miyu asked, self-consciously trying to stretch her skirt so that it covered more of her upper thigh as she noticed Fox subconsciously giving her the once over during his mental reverie.

"…Something like that," Fox answered, a flashing light on the pilot's console catching his attention. He spun back around in his chair and flipped a few switches.

"My, you've gotten more secretive, haven't you?" Miyu quipped, more amused than offended. It wasn't hard to imagine why Fox would be careful with his information around someone like her.

Fox smiled to himself as he took the call from Slippy. But the grin didn't last long. He quickly realized he still had to figure out what they were going to do with the lynx once they got back to the _Great Fox_.

* * *

"Dibs on the shower!"

"Oh for-_get_ that."

Falco and Rhena rushed off the shuttle at the same time, threading through the open door of the recently landed shuttle one by one and scurrying across the _Great Fox_'s docking bay floor. The carrier only had one shower stall onboard, which made sense as the usual crew was no more than four. It generally wasn't a problem, even since the Cornerians made their home aboard, but then, they usually never returned en masse from a night in the Cornerian sewers.

Fox and Bill arrived at the shuttle threshold just in time to catch Rhena pull even with Falco as they approached the hanger door. The shorter wolf dipped her shoulder and abruptly skewed her course, putting Falco into the door frame with a vicious body check.

Despite the night on the run they had just returned from, Fox and Bill still had enough energy to indulge in whoops of laughter as Falco crumpled to the floor, cursing aloud.

"Friggin', pushy…_butch_ sonuva-," the bird muttered to himself as he got to his feet and continued forward with a jog.

Fox stepped onto the deck with Rhena's laptop tucked under his arm, followed closely by the rest of the crew. Miyu couldn't help a remark as the four made their way across the hanger towards the door Falco and Rhena had just disappeared through.

"Never get between a girl and a desperately needed shower."

* * *

An hour later, Linka walked through the doors of the lounge sporting her only other change of clothes, rubbing the last drops of moisture from her fur with a towel. The Cornerian jumpsuit had been split in two and trimmed for practicality and comfort in the month since her arrival on the mercenary vessel, but it was still very recognizably a military uniform.

In fact, all three Cornerian pilots had changed into similar apparel, their old flight suits being their only other clothing option. The jumpsuits were getting worn and frayed from constant wear, but there was nothing that could be done. The Cornerians had no way of getting more clothes; they certainly weren't about to return to their barracks back on Castle Base, and their military bank accounts were no doubt under extremely close surveillance, if not seized and closed out altogether. Their funds were now directly tied to how Star Fox did on contracts.

One would imagine that this would be particularly hard on Rhena and Linka; Bill at least had the all-male Star Fox team to borrow clothing from. But the girls didn't complain. Perhaps the Star Fox team had gotten lucky, but the pair happened to be of two distinct, yet similar mindsets, at least for this particular matter.

Rhena was of a very practical mind, and saw many of the normal 'necessities' of civilized life as wasteful and extravagant. This included clothing. The _Great Fox_'s fabric washing system wasn't exactly state of the art; indeed it would look more at home in a rundown dormitory than a spaceship. However, it had a quick turnaround rate, which to the wolf's mind meant two changes of clothes was quite sufficient.

And Linka simply didn't care. Unlike her contemporaries, she never really developed the usual material needs of her gender during adolescence. It could've had something to do with the fact that she was rarely exposed to said contemporaries. Or it could've been her personality. Or maybe she was just holding it in because the only other girl aboard wasn't saying anything. But whatever the case, Linka too was quiet.

"Miyu's hoping in now," the young coyote reported to the room in general, referring to the shower unit.

Falco and Bill looked at each other from across the table they were sitting at, and then back at Linka. Followed by a glance at Rhena taking a post-shower nap in a chair across the room in her adjusted uniform.

"Huh," Bill quipped, noticing himself and Falco stilled reeked of the sewers and wore the same clothes from the night before.

"Yeah," Falco replied.

Fox and Slippy entered the lounge a moment later as Linka settled on a couch near Rhena and put her feet up. The avian and Bill returned their attention to the table between them as the two newcomers approached.

"What's the low down Slip?" Falco asked without looking up from holographic game he was playing with the Cornerian hound. He tapped two squares on the checkered, rectangular board in rapid succession, causing one of the blue holograms on the first square to venture to the second.

"Well I cracked the initial encryption," the diminutive toad began, hoping up on the seat opposite Fox on the last remaining side of the game table. He held a small, information-filled screen in his stubby hands. "So we know these are authentic Blue Arrow shipping logs, but for some reason the schedules of one of the freighters has additional coding on it. Higher level stuff."

"Alright…" Falco prompted as one of Bill's red holographic creatures abruptly ate the avian's recently moved blue figure. "Oh…shit."

Slippy smirked as Bill threw him a wink.

The two had formed a bit of a bond since the Cornerians came aboard the _Great Fox_. Having lived with Slippy for so long, Fox and Falco tended to be oblivious to the sort of unintentional shunning that they showed the toad. In a lot of cases it was for the best; Slippy certainly wasn't a fighter, so he was rarely included in contracts. But it amounted to a good deal of hidden resentment, especially since he had been part of the circle of friends when Fox, Falco, and Bill first met back in the Cornerian Flight Academy.

Granted, he was still the same reclusive technophile back then as he was today, but it seemed a lot like he was taken for granted onboard the _Great Fox _sometimes. And while Fox was quick to apologize and make it up to the toad when confronted with this, Falco was just as quick to blow it off as Slippy being too sensitive.

So Slippy enjoyed seeing the avian put in his place.

"So I'm pretty sure that particular vessel is the one we want. I'll need some more time to crack it, but when I do, we should have a lead as to what Blue Arrow did with their 'Miscellaneous Cargo'."

"A-k-a, Peppy," Fox finished, watching as Bill continued his turn of the game, sending one of his smaller creatures scurrying deep into Falco's blue square territory.

"They probably moved him somewhere with a bunch of other corrupt Cornerians, right?" Rhena asked from across the room, her eyes still closed.

"That'd make sense, yeah," Fox replied.

She yawned. "Just checking."

Fox cocked his head to the side and glanced at Bill, who silently shook his head and rolled his eyes, as if to say, 'Don't worry about her.'

Truthfully, regardless of their objectives, the Cornerians would've stayed with Star Fox anyway. Rhena and Linka had few friends outside their family and the Cornerian Military, and it wasn't hard to imagine those were probably unavailable for help for the time being. And not only was Bill good friends with the Star Fox pilots, but the mercenaries shared a very similar fate as the Cornerians, making them if nothing else, friends of circumstance.

Besides, their goals happened to match up anyway. Getting to Peppy would probably result in getting to the bottom of whatever conspiracy was being executed deep inside the upper ranks of the Cornerian Navy. Rhena's question was more of a friendly reminder than a threat.

"So what's the plan then?" Bill asked, smiling as the game began tilting in his favor. "How long do you need to decode the shipping schedule?"

"I can't really say for sure," Slippy replied, rubbing his hands together, "It could be a couple days or a couple hours; it all depends on what sort of algorithms they used to encrypt the data. If it's a discernable pattern, it's only a matter of finding the encryption key. If it isn't…the brute force approach could take days, even with all of the _Great Fox_'s computing power."

"So you don't know then_ oh you_ _sonuvabitch_," Falco stated, changing the target of his words halfway through the sentence from Slippy to Bill. Another one of his blue pieces had disappeared from play.

"Er…right," Slippy concluded, scratching the back of his head. He wasn't sure what just happened.

"Well, while he's doing that, I think we should drop by Shoana Freeport," Fox continued, smirking at Falco's dismay, "We're going to be close by soon, and we could really use some fresh supplies. Not to mention replacements for what we left behind on Corneria."

"We should see if we can drum up some business too," Bill nodded in agreement, "I'm still new to this whole mercenary game, but I'm noticing money's a little tight."

"Eh, that's more _our _problem than a general mercenary deal," Falco muttered, resigned to the fact that he was losing the game, "We never seem to have enough scratch for anything fun."

"Fun?" Bill questioned, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah," Falco replied, gesturing with his hand, "Working equipment, enough fuel, food other than stolen military rations…ya know, _fun_."

Bill, Fox, and Slippy laughed, though their eyes showed their acknowledgment. 'Fun' had a very different meaning to those without money.

"Well, the _Great Fox _should be good for another month or so," Fox said, "And until Slip gets that shipping itinerary decoded, we've got nothing better to do. We've still got a couple grand in the safe from our last job; let's see what useful stuff we can find."

"Works for me," Falco shrugged, chin in his palm as he focused his attention on the move the hound across from him just made. "I've had enough of this game anyway; I think Billy's cheating again."

"Pah," Bill laughed, crossing his arms, "It's a digital game; how the hell could I possibly cheat?"

"Telepathy," Falco replied, tapping his temple and smirking.

"Slippy, you need anything from Shoana?" Fox asked as he and the toad began walking towards the door of the lounge. "If it's alright with you, I'm gonna have you stay here and keep working on that code."

"I was planning to anyway," Slippy replied with a grin. "But yeah, I do need you to pick up something actually; if you could swing by the Salvage District, could you stop at uh…" He trailed off as he checked something else on his datapad. "…Rishad's Repairables, and grab a Corvette-grade Energy Weapons Battery? Any model E-WeB will do really; shouldn't be bigger than a backpack. An old friend of ours works there and owes me, so cost shouldn't be an issue, either."

"Corvette-grade Weapons Battery," Fox nodded, committing it to memory and smiling at the specificity, "Gotcha. Mind if I ask what it's for? …Or do I even want to know?"

Slippy's grin turned into a mischievous smile. "J-just a project I've been working on. If it ends up working, I'll tell you all about it."

"And if it doesn't," he continued, making an explosion sound and gesturing with his hands. He stopped laughing when he noticed Fox's concerned expression, "Well…you'll find out about it either way. L-let's just say that."

"Fair enough," Fox agreed with a smile. "So who's this old friend of ours any-"

"Hey Fox," Falco called from the lounge, just as the vulpine and Slippy reached the doorway to the rest of the _Great Fox_. Fox looked back as the bird and Bill stood up from their game, the latter's red holograms dancing little programmed dances of victory across the board. "What do we do with Miyu?"

"I was planning on locking her in one the rooms here while we're gone," Fox shrugged.

"Yeah, I'm not so sure leaving her here without us is such a good idea," Falco replied, shaking his head, "She's a resourceful little feline; remember how she snuck aboard back before shit went south?"

Fox subconsciously rubbed his jaw.

"I think the bird's right," Rhena spoke up, standing from her couch and stretching with another long, exaggerated yawn. "We'd be better off taking her with us and keeping an eye on her."

Falco looked at the wolf incredulously for a moment, briefly unable to believe they were agreeing on something. Bill seemed to think the same thing, glancing at Rhena and raising an eyebrow before returning his gaze to Fox.

"I'm going to have to agree with that," Bill admitted.

Fox shrugged. "Alright then, we'll take her with us. Anyone got a leash?"

The chuckles were half-hearted, mainly because it would actually make their lives a bit easier if they could manage to use one. They still had no idea why Miyu had decided to seek them out again after a month of freedom, though Falco's initial suspicions certainly seemed to hold plenty of logical weight. And the bird knew it.

"You know, I've been thinking; why don't we leave just her there?" Falco asked genuinely, "I mean, there's no reason for Miyu to be _here_, and I know I'm not the only one who thinks she's a risk while she knows where we are."

The silence that followed was an unspoken referendum on Falco's claim. Fox nodded slowly, thoughts tumbling in his mind.

"It _was _awful interesting that those bounty hunters attacked us minutes after you brought her back to our room," Bill offered.

"They didn't exactly seem like they were interested in her safety though," Rhena said, joining the circle forming at the door to the lounge. "She got just as many holes in that little black dress of hers as the rest of us."

"Which is actually kinda impressive given its, er, _limited _nature," Falco said with an amused grin.

"Eh…I'll talk to her," Fox said after another moment of silence. "…And maybe I'll actually let her respond this time." He smirked, suddenly remembering one of his earlier run-ins with the lynx. "But uh, if you don't see me in ten minutes, it probably means she found a wrench somewhere."

* * *

Miyu emerged from the hallway shower unit more than a half hour later amidst a cloud of steam and vapor. The fur dye had washed out completely, allowing her natural spots to show through, and she was dressed in a familiar black shirt and green pants, both grudgingly borrowed from Fox earlier. Again.

She ruffled a towel around her head a few more times before leaning back into the shower unit and threading it onto a rack.

"Everything fit okay?"

Miyu jumped a little when Fox spoke, but managed to hide it before he saw it, leaning as he was against the opposite wall of the hallway. She removed any trace of surprise from her face before stepping back into the corridor, folding her arms and locking her hips, assuming a nonchalant, amused pose.

"More or less," she replied, slipping her hands in her pockets and lifting the pants up and out a few centimeters. She cocked her head, looking down at the looseness of the pants and back at him. "Don't suppose you've got a belt I could bum too?"

'_Why not_,' Fox thought to himself as he sighed and rolled his eyes, beckoning for her to follow.

She did.

"So I never did get an answer from you," the vulpine said as they walked down the hallway, "Why were you tailing us?"

Miyu didn't say anything for a moment, pulling even with him. She was staring at the floor and to the right, away from Fox. The vulpine took this as a prompt to continue.

"You've been acting awfully civilized to still be holding that grudge of yours, and I'm not sure I believe what Falco said about you hearing that we've been scoring contracts. Plus, I mean, everyone on this ship is a wanted, bounty-posted criminal…except you."

Still, Miyu said nothing.

"Why willingly put yourself back into a situation like that?"

Fox's footsteps echoed off the hallway walls, standing out amongst the background _thrum _of the _Great Fox_'s main engines. They covered up the soft padding of Miyu's bare skin on the cool metal plating, lacking as she was in footwear of any kind. She didn't seem to mind that particular fact though; after a night spent running through back alleys and sewer systems, the smooth steel was a welcome relief to the soles of her feet. The corridor was completely empty besides the two of them.

Or, at least, it seemed that way.

Miyu, in her avoidance of Fox's suddenly fiercely questioning gaze, thought she spotted a flash of blue out of the corner of her eye, further down the hallway.

"Listen Miyu, you've gotta understand here…" Fox said, stopping at the door to his room and palming it open. It was dark inside. "I'm feeling very confused. We…_I_ saved your life not so long ago. I made sure you not only survived a very close visit from the Grim Reaper, but made a full recovery."

Miyu stopped beside him, still unable to meet his eyes. Her lips began to twitch and curl into a snarl again.

"And you know what?" Fox continued, his voice taking on a distinct edge as he began gesturing with his hands, "I did it all for _nothing_. No charge. Nada. You owe me precisely zero credits for everything I did for you."

Miyu's breath began to quicken; she could feel her anger rising inside her. Did he still not get it? Was he really too dim to understand? Her fingers began to clench into fists.

"And how do you repay me?" Fox asked the lynx, bending down a little and closing the distance between their eyes. She was _going _to look at him, he decided, even if he had to act like he was scolding a child. His eyes blazed. "With a friggin' _wrench_ to the temple. And a very good friend of mine in the friggin' medical bay!"

Miyu's mind started to spiral, and she finally granted Fox his wish. She raised her eyes and stared back into his, dark blue irises flaring with fury. If he wasn't going to stumble on the answer by himself, she might have to shove him into it headlong.

There was another beat of silence. Miyu could hear the mercenary breathing heavy, worked up mentally into a frenzy. The door to his room stood open. And she was almost positive she had seen someone down the hallway watching them before. Gears clicked into place in her head. She knew what she had to do.

"Well?" Fox half-shouted, hands rising to his sides with bewilderment. He wasn't going to shrug it off this time. Not after he had done just that so many times before, hoping the problem would go away. It clearly wasn't going to. "_Answer me, damn it_! Why won't you leave us alone? What have we _done _to you to piss you off so badly? Why don't you go bother someone else-"

Without warning Miyu's hand shot out and snagged Fox's collar, holding it firm as she pushed into him with all her mass. Weighing a third less than the moderately built vulpine, her feet had to leave the ground to gain enough force to move him. But move him she did, and he barely caught himself as he fell backwards.

Fox's words were cut off and his eyes snapped open to full attention as he was forced into the blackness of his own room. He suspected she might try something, but certainly not this.

Miyu's feet made contact with the floor again, and she kept up her momentum, thrusting Fox against the wall closest to the door. Her unoccupied hand slapped the door controls she guessed would be just inside the threshold, and the door slid closed with a sharp _hiss._ She then grasped Fox's collar with both hands, pressing up and into the region of his torso just below his neck, where his collarbone met his sternum.

The pitch black room settled for a second. They were alone.

Fox heard her heavy breathing, and noticed her balled knuckles digging deeper into his flesh. He felt her warm breath on his cheek as she stood on her toes and pressed her lips closer to his face. He could imagine those same lips twisting into a scowl; he could practically make out a growl in the complete silence of his room. And yet somehow, he couldn't move. His muscles refused to budge when he tried to muster the strength to free himself from Miyu's grasp.

But then, so suddenly that he almost didn't perceive it, the air of the room changed. Her hands began shaking. Her breath became shallow, and almost haggard. There was so little light in the room that he couldn't make out the outline of her face, even with it centimeters from his. But he could've sworn he saw the sparkle of tears welling in her eyes.

Seconds passed like minutes.

"Because," Miyu finally whispered, so quietly that Fox wasn't even sure she said anything. The chill of her words breezed by the fur on his cheek, making it stand on end. Her voice was trembling. _She _was trembling. And still, her grip was strong.

"…I don't _have _anyone else."

* * *

Alrighty; Chapter 20 up and running. On to the reviews:

**Andross Kenobi**: Thanks for the encouragement! Glad you're enjoying the story.

**RedBay**: Aha, I'm glad someone mentioned the 'journal' part. I might be incorporate more of those. Also, I've been considering everything you and others have said about Hartford/Bishop...just so you know. Thanks for the review my friend.

**The Broken Wolf**: Thanks TBW! As I said, I've been reading and considering everything you guys have been saying regarding that particular plot point. We'll see how it turns out :)

**Northernmegas: **Thanks for the kind words!

As always, any and all types of feedback (especially those of the constructive criticism sort) are appreciated; I promise that I read each review carefully, and will reply to any questions or issues you bring up. Thanks again for reading everyone.

-Redd

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	21. Chapter 21: Somewhere I Belong

**XXI**: _Somewhere I Belong

* * *

_

_One…two…three…four….five…hurgh_

Peppy winced. In the near-complete darkness of the small room, he couldn't see the belt notches as the buckling mechanism passed by them, but he could feel when they stopped passing. He pulled the strap around his waist just a little tighter.

…_Six._

Six notches. When he had come in, it had been two. Which left four widely spaced holes in the leather hanging down against his hip that hadn't been there before.

There was a sharp rapping at the metal door. A moment later, a thin slot slid open near the middle, where a folding shelf had been deployed on the other side. The shaft of normally dim light the slot emitted from the hallway was enough to nearly blind the old hare; he had to look away from the virtual burst of illumination.

Without a word, a tray of meager foodstuffs was slapped down on the shelf, followed by a final knock on the door. Footsteps echoed down the corridor, fading gradually into silence.

Peppy struggled to his feet with a loud sigh and gradually made his way to the food. He knew that they were watching him; he had heard the tiny sounds of the wall-mounted camera in the corner. Otherwise, his ravaging hunger would've compelled his gait to more of a frantic rush. But Peppy refused them that satisfaction.

He had been through similar situations a few times during his long career, and he knew that nothing infuriated those in power over a captive more than said captive's indifference to his treatment.

It was the least Peppy could do to repay them for their hospitality.

* * *

"…I don't _have _anyone else."

Just as the warmth of Miyu's breath left his skin, Fox's eyes finally began adjusting to the darkness of his room. He could see her face slowly back away from his until there was a dozen centimeters between them. He noticed how the characteristic snarl of her lips had transformed into an unnatural, almost frighteningly helpless quiver. And the glistening wetness of tears, forging a trail down the curves of her face.

Her eyes, however; her eyes never left his.

Fox couldn't believe what was happening. This creature in front of him, this…_girl_. This could not be the same lynx he had been talking to a mere minute before. This was not Miyu. This being was vulnerable, an emotion almost entirely too genuine for the lynx he knew.

Miyu's balled fists, pinning Fox against the wall by the collar of his shirt – that much, at least, was still like the old Miyu – were shaking. In her defense, so were the vulpine's, gripping ineffectually at her wrists. Her determination seemed to be wavering though, as Fox got control of his nerves. He slowly tightened his grip on her arms until her grasp was only kept at his decision.

Her eyes blinked once, breaking her stare. Then they blinked again, breaking her resolve.

Miyu released Fox altogether and backed up a step, staring past him for a moment. It almost seemed like she was in shock that, not only was she feeling the way she was, but she had just told Fox exactly what she had promised herself she never would. Her head shook from side to side slowly and slightly before she made her way to Fox's bed, sitting on the edge of it and bending forward, pressing her palms to her forehead.

Fox stared at the space she had occupied a moment before, still in awe.

_"How could I have missed it?"_

There was a loud series of knocks on the bedroom door, breaking the quiet solitude of the room.

"Fox! Man, open up!" Falco's voice called from the other side, followed by another series of rapid rapping sounds.

Without thinking or changing his facial expression, Fox immediately complied, slapping the door controls on the wall and stepping into the doorway.

The light of the hallway was surprising, but it couldn't exceed the surprise of the three beings outside the door as it swished open.

Falco, Rhena and Bill stood abreast in the threshold, all with their pistols drawn and in various states of readiness. Their looks of concern and worry quickly shifted to confusion and timidity.

"Where's Miyu?" Rhena asked, attempting to peer past him but unable to see into the dark. "Falco said he saw her pull you in here and close the door. We thought she was going to kill you."

Fox looked from speaker to speaker with absent eyes, his mind light years away and focused entirely on what had just happened.

"Uh…Fox?" Bill ventured, cocking his head to the side and lowering his weapon. "Is everything alright? …It kinda looks like you just saw a ghost or something."

"Y…yeah, yeah," Fox finally stammered, "No, yeah, I'm fine."

"You sure?" Falco asked genuinely, though with a slight edge to his voice that indicated his suspicions.

Fox glanced behind him. The shaft of light from the hallway extended back into his room far enough to illuminate the legs of the lynx on his bed. She hadn't moved yet. Fox braced himself on the doorway, extending his arms to the doorframe.

"Yeah," he said, shrugging and trying to put up an air of comfort. He then casually hefted the handle of his handgun in his thigh holster. If it was Miyu they were worried about, Fox was clearly able to defend himself. "I am."

Rhena shrugged and reholstered her weapon, imitated by Bill immediately after. Falco waited another moment before reluctantly lowering his pistol as well. His lips curled into a grimace and he snorted his misgivings. Fox stood firm though, and stayed in the doorway watching as the three walked away.

Falco couldn't help but look back over his shoulder one last time as they rounded the corner, locking eyes with his friend. If Fox knew what he was doing, then Falco felt like he could trust him implicitly. But there was just something _off _about the situation. The avian only caught a glimpse of the lynx in Fox's room, but even in that split-second, she looked almost…frail. It was unnerving.

As soon as Fox was satisfied that his friends were gone, he turned around and closed the door behind him.

A long sigh escaped his muzzle.

The weight of everything that had just happened finally fell on Fox, as well as the weight of what he had just done. He had just sheltered Miyu. Subconsciously, Fox knew that Miyu was in no state to explain herself to everyone else; the whole reason she had apparently attacked him was to get somewhere private. She clearly didn't want anyone else to know what he had just been told. And before Fox even realized this, his conscience took up the cause and defended her.

Who knew what the whole sequence of events looked like to Falco and them. Fox ignored the thought.

Miyu sat still on the edge of his bed, right where he left her. As Fox stepped towards his desk to turn on one of the smaller lamps in the room, he heard her sniff; the sound of someone fighting back emotions. The lamp flipped on and dispelled the darkness of the room, replacing it with a comfortable, drowsy light.

It suddenly struck the mercenary that he had no idea what to do.

Luckily, as Fox sat down sideways in the desk chair and faced her, she did.

"…Thanks," she whispered, looking at the ground for a moment longer before rubbing some of the wetness out of her eyes and glancing up at the vulpine. "This…this isn't, I mean…"

"Yeah," Fox cut her off, nodding in understanding. "Don't worry about it."

She smiled a brief, half-smile before returning her gaze to the floor.

The smile sent a chill down Fox's spine, and he realized that until that moment, he had never once seen the lynx before him smile genuinely, or even half-heartedly. He had seen smirks of accomplishment, toothy leers after winning an argument, and tight, terse laughs, but never an authentic expression of happiness or thanksgiving. He managed a half-smile of his own in response.

Miyu breathed deep, exhaling and rubbing her palms together. It seemed like she had something to say, though every nerve and muscle in her body urged her not to. Fox was content to let her take her time though; after what she had done to him, forcing him into his room minutes before, he could use some time to sort everything out himself. The room fell into a comfortable, if eerie, silence. The air became heavy.

Somewhere in the bowels of the _Great Fox_, the thrum of the engines shifted slightly in pitch. The ship was changing course.

A pit developed in Miyu's throat, and she swallowed to try to get rid of it. What was she doing? What had she _done_? The man – more a boy, really – that sat before her was the very last person in the Lylat System she expected to be in this situation with.

"_But that was the plan all along,"_ she thought, biting her lip. _"Even I didn't realize it_."

Miyu looked at Fox. He regarded her back, looking straight into her eyes and appearing as though he was expecting her to say something. But she didn't care for the moment. All she could see was the faintest hint of his green irises, shadowed over by the lamp at his back. Those eyes spoke to her of a life spent on the run. Of life's confusion. Of life's exhaustion. But above all, they were familiar to her. Even if every single time she stared into those emerald eyes had been, and possibly would be, with hatred, they were still familiar.

And she was just so tired.

"It's just…hard, you know?" Miyu finally said, returning her eyes to her naked feet. Emotions were spilling forth from the wall she had long ago erected around them in her mind, specifically to keep them contained. She started getting lightheaded, but she managed to stave it off. The lynx had already begun; there was no use trying to plug the leak now. She continued.

"I am not what you would call a social person." Her lips curled into another one of those half-smiles, as if she found something amusing about her words. Her voice took a weary edge to it. "I never had the chance to make friends when I was a kid, so I never really developed a need for them when I grew up. I saw how friendly people interacted with each other, and I…I always just thought that I would pick things up with time…socially. But I guess life never got around to it."

She shrugged, examining some imperfection on one of her palms. "Or…maybe it did. Sorta." Miyu looked at the fox, observing his silent prompt to continue.

"I have this habit of…of _pushing_ people away. And I know it." She suddenly seemed mad at herself. "I _know _it. Every time I do it. I realize I'm doing it, _as _I'm doing it. But I just…can't…stop. I just…"

Miyu stopped. She was still for another minute, during which Fox could barely make out the fresh tracks of a tear running down the fine fur of her cheek. There was no sniffling, nor any other sort of indication that she was crying. It was a tear of frustration.

"I just can't take this anymore. This anger, this pointless, pointless aggravation…"

Fox listened as her voice shook with those last words, and watched as her deep blue eyes bored into his. He recognized those eyes. He recognized that look. The last time he saw it was over a month ago, back before the whole fiasco with the Cornerian Navy and Blue Arrow began. Back when he first laid eyes upon the girl sitting on his bed. Or rather, when she first laid eyes on him.

* * *

_The pilot was on its side at an uncomfortable angle, facing away from the vulpine. Due to the cockpit's interior damage, including several blown out consoles and hanging wires, Fox couldn't get a straight look at much of the pilot, but a few features stuck out. A pair of wilted, pointed ears jutted out of the helmet, although it could easily be seen that they were once straight and proud. A long crimson smear sloshed down the side of a worn leather flight jacket, similar to Fox's own save for color._

_Fox thought he saw the slightest of movements in the pilot's thin, outstretched hand, but he dismissed it as a trick of the bright hanger lights as he turned and called his teammates over. They began to oblige, and the vulpine turned back towards the cockpit._

_When he did, his veins turned to ice._

_An impossibly bright red stream flowed from the pilot's heavily stained palms Fox had dismissed a second ago, running down the canopy he was only inches away from as they scratched and pawed nauseatingly at the solid, transparent material. Just behind it, before the searing image was covered up by another scarlet swipe of blood, a pair of eyes glowed desperately in half shut sockets. The pilot was saying something, but it was lost in the confines of the cockpit as the scraping of nail and flesh on the cockpit viewport material overtook it.

* * *

_

Miyu's eyes now lacked the context of a life-threatening situation, but they were no less desperate. Something about them said that she had reached the breaking point, if the past several minutes weren't evidence enough.

"When I realized this, it had been two weeks since you let me go on that Freeport," she confessed, her eyes glossing over as she remembered. "Being alone again…I-I know it sounds stupid, but the last time I felt any sort of connection with anyone was when I was flying with you and…the bird. So I started looking you guys up and found you in that bar on Corneria. I was so sick of running; I tried chasing."

Fox suddenly felt his anger slipping away, disappearing into the recycled air of his bedroom. Everything that she had done since he rescued her from Meteos; every injury she had inflicted, both physical and mental, suddenly didn't matter. The bile he had kept hidden away in his mind seeped out of every pore, disintegrating into the ether, and he felt himself become lighter.

And what replaced his frustration towards the lynx, flowing into the gaps left behind by the anger, wasn't pity or sympathy. He didn't feel sorry for her.

It was empathy. Fox understood.

Miyu's shoulders rose and fell, and she leaned back on the bed on her elbows, flipping her eyes from Fox to the ceiling. Her exhale was far too world-weary for her age.

"Shit…" she breathed, closing her eyes as though she just realized she had made a huge mistake, "Why am I even telling you this? I should-"

"Stay."

Miyu froze. A beat of silence passed. She looked at him. "What did you say?"

Fox shook his head and stood up from his chair, taking a step towards the lynx so that she could see him without sitting up. "Miyu, I…I can't pretend to know everything you've gone through. But if you're sick of running from it…stop running. Stay."

"Wha…" she stammered, not quite believing what she was hearing. "Why-"

"Don't expect things to change or anything," he qualified, taking a seat next to Miyu on the bed and laying back. He propped himself up on his elbows and regarded her like a mirror image. "I'm not about to forget that wrench to the temple. And don't expect Falco to be any less of a jackass."

They shared a chuckle at that as he offered a lopsided grin. She still looked a little skeptical.

"There'll be some responsibilities," he continued, breaking eye contact for a moment. "I mean, you'll be part of my crew after all."

"Oh yeah?" she challenged, raising an eyebrow but still smiling.

"Yeah," Fox answered, looking at her again. "I already know you're handy with a fighter, and on foot; first hand in both cases, actually. But I need to know that you can take an order."

Miyu smirked and offered a mock salute, which was slightly awkward given her position. Fox smiled in return. She suddenly got serious though, and sat up, resuming her bent over, pensive posture. Her hands began wringing together again.

"I…this doesn't mean we're _friends, _does it?" she asked.

"That's up to you." Fox caught the sarcasm in the question, but chose to ignore it, instead answering the query as though it were legitimate. He also drew the connection between the question and the lynx's confession earlier on. "Entirely up to you."

Miyu cocked her head to the side and began to explain she was only kidding, but Fox stopped her by pushing himself up and off his bed. He knew that deep down, she meant it. And he knew that she knew he realized it, too. The only way she could allow herself to ask such a naïve and meek question was through the veil of sarcasm. She fell quiet for a moment as the vulpine stretched and turned to face her.

"Fox…" she began, unable to look at him and instead searching the ground for answers. One hand balled into a fist, which slapped lightly into her other, open palm. She bit her lip. "I…"

"Hey," Fox interrupted when she paused again, shaking his head. It wasn't hard for him to see that the lynx wasn't so sure she should keep expressing herself like she was. "Take your time. I'm not going anywhere."

Miyu nodded with a blank expression, and knew he understood. She watched him turn to leave, walking away from her and apparently content to let her stay on his bed. The lynx briefly wondered if she had come across as _too _emotional in the last few minutes, but she quickly dismissed the thought as a byproduct of so rarely opening up like she just had. Besides, there wasn't anything she could do to change what she had said anyway. Those words were already lost.

Regardless, for the first time in a long, long while, Miyu suddenly felt…good. The feeling of an emotional weight being lifted is unique and indescribable every time it happens, but the idea is always the same. She felt as though her spirit were refreshed. The far reaching consequences of what was essentially her recruitment failed to sink in, and probably wouldn't for awhile; payment, teamwork, obeying orders and the like. Instead, her mind was wholly absorbed with a different sensation. A new one.

Belonging.

Fox reached the doorway and paused, turning back towards Miyu.

The lynx jumped to her feet with an unnaturally lively step and began walking towards him, when she stopped. She quickly spun around and made her way back to his desk, reaching underneath the lamp and yanking the pull string. It snapped off with a _click_, and once again the bedroom was dark, save the light spilling in from the hallway.

Miyu then jogged to the vulpine, locking eyes with him as he let her pass into the corridor of the _Great Fox_. They shared a quick smile. As soon as she was out of his room, Fox closed the door, and the two made their way to the lounge, where the rest of the team was preparing for their trip to Shoana Freeport.

As they walked though, Miyu couldn't help a final thought from crossing her mind.

"_I really hope I don't have to grin that much again anytime soon."

* * *

_

"So…_Shoana_, right?" Rhena asked, crossing her arms and approaching Falco. "I haven't heard of that particular Freeport before."

Falco stopped rubbing a small object with a well worn rag for a moment and regarded her. He was standing behind a table in the lounge, a large cloth spread out over it. Covering the cloth were the disassembled guts of a pair of pistols. The avian had been methodically cleaning and oiling the various components and pieces since returning from the episode with Fox and Miyu. In his hands now was the barrel block of one of the handguns.

The empty frames of the weapons were roughly the same size - slightly large for a sidearm - but their makes were very different. The first bore the sleek, contoured lines of a popular model of modern pistols. The second, on the other hand, looked more like something from a historical documentary; sitting next to it on the cloth was a cylindrical drum with six holes for ammunition.

"It's a little less conspicuous than somewhere like Riley," Falco responded, looking back down at the component in his hand and resuming the rag's motion. "Doesn't quite share the same level of publicity. Or the same…_restrictions_." To illustrate his point, he set down the barrel block and began reassembling the older of the two handguns.

Rhena raised an eyebrow as Falco snapped the cylindrical drum of the gun into the frame. "I take it that refers to weapons. You know, unless I'm mistaken, we're not really looking for a fight, are we?"

Falco spun the cylinder and twisted the revolver rapidly to the side, locking it in place. He looked up at Rhena and grinned. "Never can be too careful."

The wolf smiled wide in return, and if one didn't know better, they might have been inclined to assume that she was agreeing with him. At least until she said through her pearly white teeth, "You're gonna get us all killed, you know that?"

Falco just winked at her and went back to assembling his weapons. His mood seemed to have lifted significantly since he began working on them. Rhena shook her head and sat part of the way on the corner of the table, placing half her weight onto the surface. She appeared interested in the older weapon Falco was putting the finishing touches on.

"So where'd you get the antique?" she asked, nodding towards it.

"My father," Falco said, pulling back a small metal tab in back of the gun, above the grip. It fell into place with a distinct metal _click_. He shrugged. "Or at least I think so."

"You _think _so?"

"Yeah. Or my mother. Not sure. Farthest thing back I can ever remember is waking up in an alley behind an orphanage with a tiny little shirt and a big ol' gun. It wasn't loaded, of course; not that I knew how to use it if it was. But I remember it being the only thing I cared about back then. It was like a teddy bear or something. I'd always find places to stash it when I went to bed so they wouldn't find it and take it away. The caretakers, that is."

Falco shrugged again as Bill looked on gravely; the hound had heard this all before. Linka sat up from her supine position on the couch, suddenly interested. And Rhena just stared at the bird. She wasn't expecting Falco to open up as he was.

He picked up the holster for the revolver from the table and sheathed the weapon.

"I was good enough to keep it hidden long enough until I knew what it actually was. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the thing was carrying around all that time was a friggin' hand cannon." He laughed and set the holstered gun on the table. "But really, it only confirmed my suspicion on where I got it. I mean, who else besides a parent would give their unwanted kid a gun? Right?"

Rhena and Linka looked at each other with confused faces; what made logical sense to Falco was completely lost on them.

Falco picked up the other, more modern handgun frame and began assembling the second weapon. As he did, he caught a familiar shape out of the corner of his eye. Looking up, he spotted Fox and Miyu standing by the door of the lounge.

"Hey, look who it is. I hope you're at least gonna buy him dinner tonight, Miyu," Falco said with a smirk, regarding the lynx.

Miyu stepped forward and began to retort, but Fox began speaking first, loud enough to drown out any banter between the two that may have started.

"We're about a half-hour from Shoana, so I told Slip to stop and shut 'er down here; we'll take the shuttle to the Freeport." He noticed the weapon components on Falco's table. "Shoana doesn't have the same Zero Weapons Policy as other freeports, but I don't want us provoking anything. We just want to land, buy what we need, and leave. So pistols only. Anything bigger would draw unwanted attention."

"We've still got that bounty to worry about," Bill added, nodding.

"Exactly. I'm thinking that we shouldn't spend more than a few hours on the station…"

Linka got to her feet and began approaching the group gathered near Falco's table as Fox continued to outline the plan for their outing. She came to a stop beside Rhena and crossed her arms, listening to the vulpine speak. She then uncrossed her arms and let them fall at her sides. They then found their way into her front pockets before finally resting back in their original crossed arm position.

Rhena threw a sidelong glance at the young coyote. She seemed nervous about something.

"...Usual buddy system. We've got six going, so split into groups of two and get whatever you think-"

"Er, actually," Linka spoke up, a little too loud at first, but then a little too soft as she tried to adjust her voice. She seemed to be over thinking something. "I um…I was planning on staying behind on the _Great Fox_." The other five stared at her intently. She stared back with wide eyes, as if she missed something. Her cheeks were beginning to redden before she sputtered out, "I mean, if it's okay with you, sir, ah, Fox."

A tiny smirk tugged at the corner of Fox's mouth as Bill and Rhena exchanged amused expressions. "Of course. I'm sure Slippy could use the company."

Falco muttered something under his breath and quickly ducked a half-step back as Rhena whipped around and nearly slugged him across the face. She was the only one close enough to hear what he said, and made it known. "I heard that," she whispered with her fist still raised.

Fox could see Linka's cheeks continue to fade in hue to a deep crimson, so he quickly dismissed the group before the girl's embarrassment rose further. Rhena shot Falco one last glare before the Cornerians gathered and left the lounge, leaving the pair of Star Fox mercenaries and Miyu behind.

Falco laughed and shook his head, gathering up the last of his weaponry and putting it away. He fastened the pistol he had just finished assembling into its holding place on the left side of his belt, and adjusted the hip holster containing the revolver on his right thigh. He seemed proud of himself for his handiwork.

Miyu approached the now empty table and stopped across from the bird, waiting until he noticed her presence.

Falco looked up just in time to see her offer a curt, sarcastic smile before she dove forward and nailed him across the face with a vicious cuff. He cried out and stumbled backward, tripping over a chair and tumbling to the floor amidst the clatter of his handguns. Miyu fell flat on her stomach on the table and immediately began picking herself up. She got to her feet and scowled down at the fallen raptor.

"I didn't hear what you said," she said when he glared daggers back at her from the ground, "But you probably deserved that."

With that, Miyu swiftly spun around and strode out of the lounge. As she passed a vulpine on the brink of laughter, she said softly with an edge, "Your friend _is _a jackass."

Even as the door closed behind her, Fox had to nod in agreement. He walked forward to the stricken bird and bent down, offering a hand towards the fuming victim. Falco paused a moment to listen to his friend's words before reluctantly taking the offered paw.

"Man, I just don't get it; _how _are you still single?"

* * *

Chapter 21 done. Got something new to talk about in a second, but first, reviews.

Northernmegas: Certainly seems like it, eh? Thanks for the kind remarks!

notfromearth7: Thank you. Well, I chose Miyu in that role for a couple reasons. One, in an effort to break some SF Fanfic cliches, a good friend of mine and I decided to take the two least used pilots in the series (Miyu and Fay), and create stories centered around them. And two, I know it isn't quite the same personality her animations and whatnot in the ROM give off, but I wanted to do something a little different than the usual 'Star Fox team plus female OC' deal. And I felt that if I didn't do a personality COMPLETELY different than the usual Krystal clones, I'd fall into one of those stylistic ruts. Thus, Miyu. And thus, bitter.

(Also, hopefully he doesn't mind the plug, but check out my friend's story. He hasn't updated for awhile, but I highly recommend it: http:/www[dot]fanfiction[dot]net/s/3368854/1/Resolutions )

RedBay: Thank you RB; hopefully the ending/beginning to this chapter didn't disappoint. It's really good to see your reviews so often my friend; hope all's going well for you.

Okay. Something new.

I need an Original Character. I've been contacted by a few people over the course of this story, offering OCs as characters should I need them. Well...now I need them. Or one, rather.

Here are the requirements. The OC must be:

-Male

-In his twenties

-Have an old friendship with Bill.

After that, the rest is up to you. Surprise me! I will reserve the right to tweak some things here or there, but I'll do my best to keep my coloring within the proverbial lines. Why am I doing this? Because I really want to involve you guys more. Like I've said before, this is a hobby that brings an immense amount of enjoyment and relaxation to me, and for those of you reading this, I'd like to extend that same 'destressing' your way. Please include a physical description, emotional description, and short (couple paragraphs) bio of the OC in a personal message to me via my profile page. Please do not leave it as a review. PM it. I only need one for what I have in mind right now, but send as many as you like.

As always, many thanks for reading my story.

-Redd

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	22. Chapter 22: Shoana Pt I

**XXII:**_ Shoana Pt. I  
_

"Do you know, Mr. Hare, much about the power of thoughts?"

Peppy looked up at the shade in front of him, illuminated from behind like all of his other 'visitors.' He grinned as much as he could, showing the man a row of teeth stained brown from his own blood.

"Sure do," he replied, pausing a moment as a violent coughing fit tore through his chest. He gradually recovered, spitting something out of his mouth. "I've been pretending I'm in a four star resort this whole time. When are you bringing the pretty young masseuse around?"

The shadow in front of his chair hummed a tiny laugh of amusement, and Peppy could have sworn he saw the featureless shadow smirk. "In time, my friend. In time." The man went on with his original train of conversation. "But allow me to clarify; it's not so much the power of your own thoughts that I'm concerned about."

"Oh yeah?" Peppy spat back.

"Indeed. Instead, my question focuses more on the power of _my _thoughts…" the shadow trailed off for emphasis, dropping his voice to a deep bass as he did so.

"Listen friend, I know I'm the one drugged up with whatever the hell you've been putting in here," Peppy said, lifting his wrists. Tiny clear tubes ran into each, filled with some sort of bright pinkish liquid. "But I'm still sane enough to know you're no psychic. Your thoughts can't do anything; they stay nice and safe in your head."

The shadow was quiet. When Peppy's gaunt, thin face showed nothing but confusion and a bit of curiosity, the man laughed a slow, drawn out laugh. "Well, I'm afraid that's where you're wrong Mr. Hare. You aren't exactly our ideal subject, still breathing and all, but I think you'll find that my thoughts have a way of…_getting around_."

* * *

"Alright Slip, the shuttle's clear; engaging radio blackout. You play nice now kids. No parties while we're gone."

Slippy Toad shook his head as Fox McCloud's voice crackled through the _Great Fox_'s bridge communication system. He never looked away from the console he was furiously typing away at. Streams of code and bits and bytes of information tumbled by as his nimble little fingers flew across the keyboard. He paused every few minutes to glance up at some figure on the screen, perplexed. The confusion would only last a few moments though, as a jolt of realization would soon rattle his brain, and he'd dive right back into his work, trying to crack the code of the stolen Blue Arrow shipping logs.

Linka Pyrokanzia lay splayed out across Fox's command chair, eyes focusing lazily on the radar screen embedded in another console on the bridge, next to the ships steering yoke. The young coyote watched a flashing green dot drift away from the pair of larger icons in the middle of the display. One symbol, which matched the emblem painted on the _Great Fox_'s tail fin, represented the carrier itself. The other, more irregularly shaped image, just to the left of the mercenary team's emblem, was a massive asteroid just off the _Great Fox_'s port. The bulk of the rock obscured half of the bridge's panoramic front viewport.

Linka sniffed and adjusted her long shorts at the knee. The fabric, which was formerly the bottom to her pilot's jumpsuit, was frayed from where she had trimmed it with Rhena's knife. Most of the edges of her outfit sported the tatters of a rough pruning. In fact, the only piece of entirely whole clothing she wore was a small length of deep blue fabric, tied around her bicep like a tourniquet. But the jagged cloth wasn't what was truly irritating her. It was the giant asteroid.

True, Fox's logic had been sound; the unique "L"-shape of the metallic rock would allow the _Great Fox _to nestle in a radar safe zone, leaving them invisible to all but the most persistent of scans. But it worked both ways. The carrier was more or less blind to half of the Meteos asteroid field they were deep in the heart of. Raiders could stalk them and not show up on the radar until the last second.

"Aha!" Slippy cried out, pumping a fist in elation.

Linka raised an eyebrow in surprise.

"Didya solve it?" she asked, tilting her head in the crook of her elbow. Her words were muffled.

"Huh?" Slippy said, spinning in his chair and looking at Linka. It would've been a perfectly reasonable assumption to guess that he had forgotten she was still on the ship. "Oh. Um, not yet. I just got a lead on one of the segments."

"Sweet," she deadpanned in response, though without the sarcasm that usually came with such a delivery.

"Yeah!" the toad replied enthusiastically, spinning back around in his chair and going back to work.

Linka threw her arms behind her head and let them dangle off the armrest of the chair for a moment. Sighing, she then threw them forward, using the momentum to drag herself up and out of the chair. She stretched before stepping off the small dais the captain's chair was elevated on, towards Slippy's station. She reached the terminal and turned around, crossing her arms and resting on the lip of the console, not a meter from the toad. He didn't even look up.

She leaned towards him and tried to make sense of the constantly shifting characters on the screen before him. Several minutes passed. She tried for a long time.

"So…you actually understand all that?" the coyote finally asked, shaking her head in disbelief.

Slippy made an affirmative sound as he continued working. "It's actually not that bad; this is only encryption. You don't have to program anything or worry about syntax. Purely algorithmic work."

Linka let a beat pass. "Not that _bad_? We must be looking at different screens because I'm…not even entirely sure what you just _said_ right there."

Slippy finally noticed her blank expression and chuckled. "W-well, 'not that bad' once you get used it. And if you know what you're looking for. It's kinda fun to be honest."

Linka laughed and widened her eyes incredulously. "_That_'s fun?"

"Well sure!" the toad replied eagerly, rubbing his hands together. Linka noticed that it seemed to be a twitch he had. He began jabbing a finger at different points around the screen in front of him. "Once you get the hang of it, a-all the little bits and pieces…it's almost like a puzzle, trying to fit everything together."

Linka leaned back and idly adjusted the blue cloth around her arm. She was amused at Slippy's enthusiasm. "Alright," she conceded, "I'll take your word for it."

He looked away from his monitor for a second and grinned at her. As soon as she smiled back though, he quickly diverted his gaze and returned his attention back to the computer console. He rubbed his hands together and began typing again.

Silence reigned for a few moments as Linka returned to whatever shell she had just found a way to peer out of. She crossed her arms again and glanced around the bridge, setting her jaw. She let herself think.

The gold furred coyote couldn't quite put a finger on why, but she felt a connection to the toad squinting at the console screen.

With what little world she had known having collapsed around her in the past month, Linka had done what she could to find something stable to cling to. That need wasn't something she was proud of. She was always a quiet, self-sufficient girl. She didn't require much, but she found what she needed with her fellow Cornerian Pilots and the Star Fox mercenary squad they had joined up with. To her, it felt like they had become an impromptu family of sorts, complete with all the usual disfunctions. Falco and Rhena's in particular proved immensely amusing.

And yet, for the most part, they all seemed just a little distant. And Linka recently deduced why. Whatever the situation, they just couldn't walk the fine line of respect versus assistance for the girl of sixteen.

Often times, if the group went out of their way to make room for 'The Kid,' as they liked to call her, Linka felt as if she were a little sister tagging along with her older siblings. They always gave her the safe, noncombat roles. She appreciated the sentiment, but it came off as being overbearing at times. She knew damn well that she could handle herself in a fight; she had passed all the mandatory training classes back at the academy. In fact, she had passed with flying colors; it was why she was flying with a real squadron so young. But even Bill, who had fought beside her first hand, had taken the stance of a protective older brother.

And then during the few times over the past month when she could actually use a sit down with one of them to just talk things out, they were nowhere to be found. Or the boys were off reminiscing about old times somewhere. Rhena did what she could, but Linka knew the wolf didn't quite understand emotions the same way most did. She didn't understand the stress an unstable mercenary lifestyle could put on such a young mind.

But then Linka met Slippy. Maybe it was the sort of invisible presence he provided when they shared the bridge or the lounge; the sort of reassurance that she wasn't currently alone at the moment, even though it usually seemed like Slippy was oblivious to her being there. Like if she were to suddenly cry out due to a panic attack, an idea Linka abhorred for the weakness it would show, someone would be there to hear it. Or maybe it was that they shared roughly the same age, or at a similar social distance from the main group.

The creatures that inhabited the Lylat System were undoubtedly social animals, regardless of where each individual stood on the social interaction chart. And whatever the reason, and while Linka considered herself very low on that social needs spectrum, sometimes she needed that quiet presence just to think things over, and provide that calm.

Linka padded back to the captain's chair, noticing as she settled back in it that it possessed the faint scent of vulpine. As she did, Slippy emitted another squeal of accomplishment, pumping a stubby arm into the air as another section of the encrypted file fell before his mighty digital onslaught.

"_Besides," _the coyote thought with an amused smile, setting back into her seat, _"He can be kinda cute sometimes_."

* * *

The shuttle landed with a hiss, the built up fuel vapors releasing into the stale, eternally recycled hanger air.

Shoana's parking complex was smaller, and some would say more intimate, than the massive open air garage favored by other larger spaceports. The shuttle was nestled in its own private 'cubbyhole'-type construction amidst several dozen others on the station's outer walls, like the honeycombs of an insect hive. Each cubby was partitioned off from its neighbors, precluding any initial interaction with other patrons of the Freeport.

One wall was completely open to the crowded asteroid field of Meteos, the only barrier being an invisible magnetic force field holding the atmosphere of the landing box in. The opposite wall featured a small gathering platform in front of the doorway to the rest of the station. It was here that the shuttle's gantry extended as sturdy magnetic arms held the craft itself aloft, and in place.

First out of the shuttle was a brown-furred vulpine, sporting a pistol on his hip and a jagged scar skipping over his left eye. He walked loosely as he made his way across the gantry, wearing a casual black shirt tucked into his casually belted denim pants. With his backpack slung over one shoulder and slanted at an angle, one could argue that he was almost 'trying' to appear casual.

A raptor followed the fox across the ramp, talking animatedly with a hound and picking at a piece of lint on the elbow of his long-sleeved button-down. The shirt's dull red hue collaborated with the bird's natural orange tones, though both were largely hidden by a casual jacket, left unzipped. Shades perched on the avian's head completed the look.

Miyu followed.

"So, I gave it some time, like you said," she began, joining the three at the doorway to the rest of the Freeport. She had one arm bent across her chest, holding the elbow of her other arm as she rubbed her chin in a classic thinker's pose. "And I've come to the conclusion that you all still look ridiculous."

Bill looked crestfallen, glancing down at his only change of non-military clothes and back at the lynx. He thrust his arms out to the side. "Aw; but they worked fine for our last outing!"

Miyu smirked and leaned forward, tapping her forehead.

Without thinking, Bill tried to look up at his own hairline and was immediately disappointed by, predictably, being unable to see anything. He quickly remembered what he had done to it back on the shuttleafter they had left the _Great Fox_, and was suddenly glad he couldn't see the jet black follicles that lay just out of his sight. Nor was he disappointed that he couldn't catch a glimpse of the patterns of similarly hued face paint that ran down his face and neck like faded tattoos.

"Oh…right. Yeah, was the whole tribal thing really necessary?"

"Well, we had to do _something_; you're too damn grey, Bill Grey," Fox commented, laughing at the hound, "Without context a black hair job would have been way too obvious. People would start trying to figure out what you look like without the dye job."

"Obvious? Speak for yourself Foxie," Falco said, "Did you really have to spring for the friggin' villain scar?"

"Okay, first of all, absolutely," Fox replied, crossing his arms in mock indignation. "I think we can all agree how undeniably spectacular said scar is. And second, I refuse to take fashion advice from captain _subtlety_ over here."

Falco laughed at that; he couldn't deny the absurdity of his particular color of skin dye. And yet somehow, it worked. It was a natural hue for some of his species, and he could actually pull it off.

Miyu rolled her eyes and smirked. She had managed to scrounge one of Fox's old grey academy jackets that he had long since grown out of, but which fit surprisingly well on her smaller frame. Other than the extra piece of clothing though, nothing else had changed since leaving the _Great Fox_. She still wore Fox's black shirt and green pants. Without a bounty to worry about, she could afford to be the only member of the group in the hanger without any sort of identification concealing body altercations in place.

Well, almost the only one. A mundane Rhena poked her head out of the shuttle.

"It would've been nice if someone had told me about the plan _before _we took off," she said, leaning against the shuttle's hull. Her deep green pilot's jumpsuit had been cut down to a rough set of serviceable pants and an inherently matching shirt. "I would've just stayed with Link and the toad."

"Hey, there's still some hot pink stuff in the locker in back if you really wanna come," Falco offered, shouting across the small gap between the two.

The black-furred wolf gave him a deadpan stare. If it was possible, it almost seemed like her bright orange hair itself was glaring at him.

"So…is that a yes?" Falco asked.

"We'll stay in touch and let you know when we're headed back," Bill said, scratching an itch beneath his dyed hair, "Shouldn't be more than a few hours."

Rhena tossed the hound an informal salute in acknowledgement and stepped back out of view, into the shuttle. She then embarked on the arduous task of trying to find something to busy herself until then.

* * *

"H-hey alright! This might not take so long after all…"

Linka awoke to the sound of Slippy's idle, spoken musings. Upon opening her eyes, the only thing she could see was the dull, gunmetal grey ceiling of the bridge arching over her. She was vaguely aware of the fact that her head was dangling over open air, as were her shins.

She had fallen asleep, sprawled across the command chair.

"Ack," Linka muttered, slowly rising and twisting into a sitting position. Her neck was sore, and her muscles were full of all sorts of kinks. She shook her head free of the lingering tendrils of sleep and stood up, stretching as much as her aching body would allow.

"Hm?" Slippy said, spinning around in his chair. "Oh! I uh…I forgot you fell asleep there."

"How long was I out?" Linka asked.

"Um…well I'd say you've been quiet a good couple hours," Slippy replied, checking his wristwatch.

Linka nodded, rubbing and bending her neck slowly to one side until the crick cracked. It sounded about right. She glanced towards the toad and his workstation, noticing a mug of steaming liquid resting on the lip of the console. Her muzzle took in the distinct smell of a freshly brewed military caf ration, and it suddenly seemed like the very scent was enough to cause the stimulant drink's effects in her. The coyote's eyes opened a little wider.

"I uh…I don't suppose you made any more of that," she asked in a curious tone.

Slippy followed her line of sight and saw the coffee. "Oh, sure," he replied, gesturing towards the doors of the bridge, "There's a whole pot in the mess in the lounge. You can help yourself."

She was already halfway off the bridge before he finished speaking.

* * *

"Bill, we've been looking for this place for a half hour now; where the hell are we going?"

"Now, if I knew that my friend, we wouldn't still be searching now would we?"

"But this is a freeport! There's literally an arms dealer _right there_. See him? Right over there? He's the guy waving a friggin' assault rifle in the air, and _not _getting gunned down for it."

"I know, I know. Fox said we were in charge of weapons. I'm…I'm just shopping around a bit is all."

"By looking for one specific place?"

"…Yeah."

Falco and Bill edged around another group of rambunctious young shoppers as they progressed through the market district of Shoana Freeport.

Even as Bill was searching for a certain stall though, he couldn't help but notice how utterly surreal the environment that surrounded him was. Unlike his companion, the former Cornerian fighter pilot had very little experience aboard the infamous freeports of the Lylat System. As a servant of the system's largest military, he imagined stepping aboard one would've been tantamount to swatting a hornet's nest. Indeed, his entire career, he had been warned about the less than welcome response his status as a soldier would bring. Bill liked to think of himself as one who didn't form prejudices based on rumors and hearsay, but it was difficult not to develop a bias against freeports and those who called them home after several years of this form of military indoctrination.

So it came as quite a surprise when he found out that their reputation as dens of inequity and hideouts for all sorts of criminals was only partially true, and only part of the story. Families with nowhere else to go tried to scratch out a living amidst the quasi-legal dealings and shady 'underground' elements. Honest men, women, and children peddled their wares in the same cavernous corridors as weapons smugglers and slave traffickers.

After Bill had gotten over that initial shock though, he quickly remembered why he had been so secretly excited about Fox's announcement to stop at Shoana. If only he could find the place…

"Bah," he sputtered in frustration, stopping in the middle of a crowded marketplace. His mind raced for a moment, trying to think of the best next step.

From out of nowhere a wolf pup, his head barely reaching past Bill's waist, barreled into his hip. Both the hound and the child cried out in surprise and fell over in opposite directions. They hit the tough metal of the station floor at the same time, Bill on his side and the pup sprawled on all fours. The suddenness of the incident stunned the Cornerian for a second as he was suddenly at eye-level with dozens of pairs of shoes, sandals and bare feet strolling through the busy district.

As soon as his eyes refocused though, he shook his head and quickly regained his composure.

"Hey, watch it," he said as gently as he could, pushing himself back to his feet. He dusted his pants off and offered a hand to the child, who was still on the ground. "You shouldn't run around like that." People continued milling around them as if nothing happened.

The young pup looked up at the hound for a moment with the perfect mix of fear and guilt. He took the offered hand and leveraged himself to his feet. The child mimicked Bill, brushing off his tattered trousers.

"I-I'm s-sorry mister," the wolf pup squeaked in a hopelessly endearing manner, doing his best not to grovel.

Bill smiled and began to wave it off when the pup suddenly bolted away from him.

Right into the waiting arms of a red jacketed avian.

"Whoa there kiddo," Falco bellowed, catching the pup's collar and forcibly dragging him back between himself and Bill. "I think you owe my friend here an apology."

"What're ya talking about? I _said _I'm _sorry_," the kid barked back, all traces of sweetness completely gone.

"Falco, what're you doing?" Bill asked with concern.

"I mean an apology of a _monetary _nature," Falco said, smiling with amusement.

"I don't know wha-" the pup began snarling.

Falco suddenly frowned and grabbed the kid's collar with both hands, hoisting him high into the air. The pup's arms and legs flailed helplessly and he began shrieking for help. Still the people around the three carried on, either oblivious or utterly indifferent to the situation unfolding.

"You hear that ya punk?" Falco asked, dropping any pretense of friendliness. The kid stopped his wailing. "That's right. Nobody cares. Now give my friend back his credits and I'll put you down slowly." When the wolf pup took too long to reply, Falco let go. The station's artificial gravity pulled the kid to the floor for a brief, terrifying second before Falco caught him and pulled him back high into the air.

"Alright! Alright!" the child screamed, fishing into his pocket and pulling out several hundred credits in large denomination chips. He dropped them to the floor and Bill stooped to pick them up.

The hound pulled out his currency clip and found that he had indeed been missing the exact amount now sprinkled at Falco's feet. His initial sympathy towards the child evaporated, replaced instead by what he could only describe as a mild sense of betrayal.

Once Bill had finished recollecting his cash, Falco put the kid down and let go with one hand, leaving one stuck firmly to his collar. The pup tried to flee but was stopped dead by the bird's tough grip.

"What?" the pup whined.

"Hold up kid," Falco commanded as though he were talking to a pet. He leaned over to Bill, who had just finished filling the credit clip and putting back into his pocket. "Hey, what's the name of the place you're trying to find?"

Bill shrugged. "I don't know what's it's called. I know they guy who runs it though. His name's Mierse."

Falco turned back to the kid, who was resigned to the fact that he had gotten himself in way over his head with the pair of mercenaries. His face was beginning to look forlorn, like he just wanted to go home, wherever that might be.

"Know anything about a guy named Mierse?" he asked.

The pup's visage suddenly shifted to a bratty smirk. Bill still couldn't get over how authentically pathetic and frankly adorable the kid had seemed just moments ago when he ran into the hound. "Maybe. What's it to ya?"

Falco barked out a laugh. "Smart little pisser, ain'tcha?" He turned to Bill again, nodding in the direction of a close circle of rough-looking men nearby. They were huddled near the entrance to an 'alley' of sorts, connecting two districts of the station. "Bill, go talk to those slavers over there. See how much they want for a clever orphan who weighs…" Falco trailed off as he again hoisted the pup into the air, jostling him up and down as he tried to gauge his mass.

He never got a number out though, as the kid almost immediately broke down.

"Okay! Shit…" the pup muttered. "He runs a shooter supply over by the warehouse district. He's a mean sonuvabitch though; chases people out of his place with live bullets, I swear."

"Probably just little snots like you who try to steal his stuff," Falco said, finally putting the kid down for good. He fished a five credit chip from his pocket and handed it to the kid, tussling his hair with a free hand. "Good grab by the way; don't wait around to apologize next time."

The wolf pup's jaw fell open and he stared at the avian for a moment, surprised to hear those words. He looked at the chip in his hands. Once he realized Falco wasn't holding him anymore though, he booked it, turning and disappearing into the shifting crowd.

Falco chuckled and turned to Bill, who had a blank look on his face. He simply didn't know which emotion to express: relief at getting half the team's money back, anger at the tiny con artist, or surprise at Falco's parting quip.

"Cute kid," Falco stated, sighing and crossing his arms like a proud parent. Bill's face got even more incredulous. "Anyway, shall we go?"

* * *

It was a few more minutes of walking and searching before the pair of mercenaries found the place.

Tucked neatly into a corner, just before the inter-district corridor to the warehouse section of Shoana, _Meersy's Munitions _wasn't much to look at. Its outer walls were made of thin, ribbed metal, adorned with hastily hung posters, advertising various pieces of weaponry. It was clearly one of the pre-fabricated structures built with cost and efficiency in mind, shipped wholesale straight from the factory floor. In fact, the building looked to have been cast from a single mold; if business turned sour, it wouldn't have shocked the mercenaries if the store's owner simply booked passage on the next cargo freighter and had his entire store shipped out, structure and all.

Bill and Falco looked at each other and shrugged, entering the store with a sense of curiosity.

As soon as they stepped through the doorway, trip sensors detected their presence, and a friendly chime sounded through the store's speakers. The mercenaries looked around.

The long, narrow space was very practically laid out, with the cashier's counter in the back past rows and rows of weapon models mounted on the walls. Display stands and random promotional posters dotted what little floor space was available, and were usually surrounded by stacks of ammunition and sidearm accessories. The room was lit by the simple, blinding white light of fluorescent bulbs.

At the back counter, a short man in a dark colored suit turned away from his conversation with the shopkeeper and glanced at the newcomers to the store. Even from the opposite end of the store, Bill could hear the man grunt in annoyance at the mercenaries, the only other two patrons in the shop. Falco would've also heard, had he not been busy ogling the merchandise.

The man turned back to the cashier and offered a few parting words before lightly slapping his hand on the countertop. He then turned and began to make his way out of the store, offering no further acknowledgement of the mercenaries' existence as he passed them. When he reached the door, the suited man stopped and turned back towards the store owner, staring him down for a moment. Then he smiled and left. As he exited, the store's electronic chimes sounded again.

"Bill."

Bill smiled as he turned around, shrugging off the odd vibe of the suited man and happy to hear himself recognized so quickly. He was a little surprised, too; his was the least extreme of the disguises the Star Fox away team had applied while on Shoana, but it still seemed like quite a feat to be recognized. The weary tone of his friend's voice didn't immediately sink in.

"Jason!" he exclaimed in reply, walking towards the counter and storeowner behind it with arms raised. "It's been awhile man! I couldn't believe it when I realized you opened up a dealership on this hunk of junk. How's business?"

The young grey fox behind the counter raised a hand in the air in greeting, though little else about him seemed eager to greet an old friend. He flopped back in a folding chair as Bill approached, palming his forehead and pushing his fingers through a tuft of brown scalp. He breathed deep, exhaling a sigh of exhaustion. The vulpine looked defeated, as though he had just lost a long, grueling match of physical competition. Bags hung heavy under bloodshot eyes, and his short, pointed ears lacked their usual attentiveness.

In short, Jason Mierse looked troubled.

"Eh, not bad I suppose," he said, smiling weakly and glancing up at Bill, who had made it to the counter and was looking down at him. He shrugged. "Yeah…not bad."

Bill raised an eyebrow and laughed a little. "Are you sure there buddy?" he asked, leaning forward and resting his arms on the countertop. "Cuz' you look like you just got rocked in the gut or something."

Jason lolled his head from side to side and hummed a noise, looking away.

"…Did that guy just punch you in the stomach?" Bill deadpanned.

"No, no," Jason said, slowly pushing himself up from the chair and getting to his feet. He brushed a crease from his camouflaged pants before crossing his arms. "It's just that guy, he…well, never mind. Forget about it."

Bill looked crestfallen. This wasn't the joyous reunion he was expecting.

Jason shook his head, putting on a smirk. He slapped the hound on the shoulder. "But hey man, it's really good to see you. How's it been?"

Falco was able to tear his gaze away from the treasure trove of ranged weaponry that decorated the walls of the shop long enough to watch Bill and his friend finally greet each other in earnest. They began laughing about some thing or another, and Falco chuckled himself as he returned his interest to the guns. He found it oddly amusing that a military regular like Bill would be friends with a weapons dealer on a freeport. On paper, the two seemed like they should be leery of each other at best.

"_On the other hand," _he thought, hefting an empty rifle model from its display mountings, _"He is currently flying with a band of wanted mercenaries."_

He took a moment to appreciate the item in his hands, and the many others like it on the shelves around him. The freshly polished gun advertised itself well, according to the displays nearby; it featured every modern convenience and feature one could hope for. A fancy scope, fitted pistol grip, extendable stock, expanded magazine…the list went on. The mercenary held it tightly and sighed, putting it back in its place with a heavy heart. The price of such a beautiful piece of combat gear would drain the amount Fox allotted them for weaponry all by itself. But gun lust was nothing new to the avian.

Falco slowly made his way down the line of weapons, eventually winding up at the counter at the back of the store, listening to Bill and Jason start to slow their fond reminiscences.

"So I've gotta ask, man," Jason was saying as Falco came within conversation range, "What're you doing _here_, of all places? What brings you to this particular neck of the solar woods?"

"Well, we're in the market for some arms procurement," Bill replied, placing his arm on the table as if he were telling a secret. "And something told me this was a good place to find arms to procure."

Jason smirked, bowing. "Well, I thank you for your patronage, good sir. A better selection of personal weaponry you'll never find." As Bill chuckled, the fox slowly let go of his smile. "But seriously. Billy-boy, I know it's been a few, but I can still tell when you're holdin' something back. And right now, you're holdin' something back. What's up?"

"I don't know what you're…" he tried to protest, but Jason's unwavering expression of expectation stopped him cold. Bill looked at his friend, his smile also fading into a faint shadow of itself. The ground was the next focus of his sight. He knew he would have to answer; it was the whole reason he had sought Jason out in the first place, whether he wanted to admit it to himself or not. He moved a hand to a spot just below his neck. There was a faint outline of something beneath his shirt, about the right height to have been attached to a necklace. Something small. Something circular.

Jason's semi-playful expression disappeared, and was replaced with a look of faint regret. His body language acted out almost identically to Bill's had a moment before. He looked at the floor. Suddenly, as Jason knew for certain what Bill wanted to ask, he didn't really want to give the answer. But just like Bill, he came to the conclusion that he really had no choice.

Falco watched both of their faces drop, one after the other, with growing trepidation. The avian wasn't exactly known for being in touch with the emotions of others, but it didn't take a psychiatrist to realize that something very wrong had happened to someone or something known by both Bill and Jason.

Jason sighed, finally willing to make eye contact with Bill again. The hound began to speak, but Jason cut him off, answering what he knew Bill's question was going to be.

"Sophie's gone cold," he finally said, grimacing as the hound's posture sank. "I've checked and rechecked the proxy servers and data paths, and there's nothing wrong with the lifeline. Billy…your fiancé's missing."

* * *

_This tapestry of colors - the brilliant blond of the unimpaired star, the ubiquitous cerulean of the Sector X field, and the deep, strong red of the convoy's engines – swirled together in an orchestra of light and hollow sound. And yet, despite this rainbow of natural beauty, the pilot of the CDF Fighter couldn't help but allow his eyes to focus on a spot on the cockpit dashboard._

_Taped just above one of the many instrument readouts was a small, rectangular, black and white picture. In the "impromptu portrait" style photo, a slightly younger looking Bill was grinning, even as he bore the weight of another on his back. The playful-looking husky had her arms wrapped around his neck, laughing and holding on for dear life. The way the pair was lurching forward suggested that she had had a running start. The photo only showed them from the waist up, but it was taken just as the hound was reaching back to support his sudden passenger._

_Bill smiled, suddenly becoming wistful. __"What I wouldn't give to share a sight like this with someone-"_

_Sirens blared to life and the minimal colored lines of his HUD suddenly faded from a soothing blue to an angry orange, interrupting his quiet thoughts as training took over.

* * *

_

Thank you to everyone who contributed characters for the OC 'contest' I put up last chapter; I was delightfully surprised by the quality of the entries. The winner was introduced in this chapter; congratulations to Broken Wolf! To all those who submitted a character and didn't win, I may (with your permission, of course) still use it latter in the story. Thanks again everyone. It meant a lot to see so much interest.

On to the reviews!

**The Broken Wolf: **Many thanks for the kind words. But I'm going to have to disagree with you on your point; Falco would totally be a revolver type fella. What else says brash and wild more than a six-shooter? Well, two six-shooters I suppose. But six-shooters none the less. We'll have to agree to disagree on that one :)

**RedBay: **A good analysis; couldn't have put it better myself Redbay. While I wasn't quite going for _suggestive_, I _was_ going for emotional with that scene. And to really get it across, I felt like I should use some unusually dramatic phrasings that in retrospect, probably could come off as suggestive. So in short, don't worry; I was well aware of the potential confusion it might've caused. In fact that may have been my plan, haha. And no worries, your reviews far from drive me crazy. In fact, I look forward to them. You've stuck with this story a long time, and I really appreciate your insight. Thanks for the review buddy.

As always, thank you for reading my story. Please know that I'm always open to any and all feedback, critical or not, brief or long.

-Redd

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	23. Chapter 23: Shoana Pt II

**XXIII: **_Shoana: Part II_

"Sir, the techniques are taking...longer than expected."

"I'm quite aware, thank you."

"Is the information he has truly that important? We're getting predictions from medical that his body will go due to stress before his mind breaks."

"..."

"...It's why I warned against using the same methods on a living spec-"

"If he goes, we'll be able to recycle him like the conventional subjects."

"True, but he won't be of any use, will he? They don't retain knowledge-"

"I know full well the lack of information transition. It doesn't mean he won't be of any use. He will yet fulfill his purpose."

* * *

Miyu watched a child go sprinting through the market, clutching what appeared to be a small-value credit piece in one hand. The wolf pup seemed to be running from something. A stampede of similarly aged kids in hot pursuit answered the question of 'what'.

The lynx stood leaning against a column of hastily assembled wooden planks that held a group of merchandise stalls together. She breathed deep the smells and took in the sounds of the bustling place of commerce: customers haggling, vendors shouting advertisements, aforementioned children laughing and screaming. Someone was playing old string instruments somewhere. It wasn't so long ago that she had lived the life of many of those who were now accidently bumping into her. It wasn't so long ago that she had called a Freeport like Shoana home.

Next to her, Fox finally settled with a shopkeeper on the price of his wares, and began counting out the credit chips. Miyu noticed how Fox kept his credit stack low and close to him as he flipped through it, and how he would occasionally glance around, even while maintaining a friendly banter with the merchant. He was no stranger to freeports either.

Fox handed over the payment of credits and shook the dealer's hand with both of his, finalizing the transaction. Miyu had observed how ritualistic some of the backwater merchants tended to be. Every purchase seemed to be prefaced and closed with identical gestures. Both parties, the seller and the buyer, would grasp each other's hand in a standard handshake, and each would apply their second hand to the greeting. It supposedly symbolized commitment to the deal. To Miyu, ancient traditions like that never ceased to seem almost surreally out of the place on a space station floating through the ether between planets.

As the dealer counted the credits for himself, Fox began stacking up the large assortment of packages and boxes into something resembling order. He doffed his backpack and unzipped it, handing it to the lynx to hold.

"So whadya get?" Miyu asked, watching as Fox placed the larger, heavier boxes in first. They were all plain, brown, unmarked containers, precluding any external method of identification.

"Oh, you know, just the good stuff," the vulpine replied with a smirk, looking up at her for a brief second before piling more into the bag, "Deep frozen beef, preserved berries, condensed protein…do you really want me to go on?" Fox laughed. "I can if you want me to."

"That's fine," Miyu said, matching his smile. He tossed the last, tiny packets of cheap seasonings and additives in before zipping the pack shut and taking it back from the lynx.

Fox slung it over his shoulder and thanked the merchant once more before nodding at Miyu and heading off into the market. She pulled even with him, quiet as she observed the crowd of people around them. They walked past the tribally dressed musicians they heard earlier, a basket in front of them holding spare credits from others passing by. As they did, Fox reached down in his pocket and pulled out a couple of paper-wrapped candy bars. He tapped one on Miyu's shoulder, catching her attention.

"Hah, thanks," she said, accepting it and barely waiting to peel the wrapper before biting into it. She glanced around at the throng as they progressed through it. "Sowhas lefon tha lis?" she asked through bits of chocolate.

"Well, with Bill and Falco handling the weapons, not much. Just have to stop by the salvage district and grab something for Slippy," Fox replied, snapping off a piece of his treat and tossing it in his mouth. Miyu nodded thoughtfully.

It still amazed her how quickly the tension between them seemed to have lifted, at least at first glance. Their chemistry had become one of master and apprentice, rather than hunter and hunted. In a society where personal opinions and bias were as difficult to mutate as a steel bunker, and the few true alterations that did occur took weeks and months to carry out, Miyu's confession in Fox's room had struck like a nuclear warhead. In a few shorts hours, their respective judgments of each other were dashed to pieces, and replaced instead by an odd, mutual feeling. Respect.

The density of people began to thin as the pair reached the outskirts of the marketplace's main cluster of stalls. The shops were still open constructions beneath the station's cavernous ceiling, but their make and design became more and more utilitarian, lacking the ethnic flare of the central booths. In addition, their wares took on more technical and industrial origins.

Finally, the stalls thinned out completely to a short span of open floor space between the edges of the marketplace and one of Shoana's truly massive bulkheads. The wall stretched up and out of sight, disappearing into the dark, upper corners where the lively lights of the commerce distract couldn't reach. A short corridor split the massive bulkhead, leading into another district of the freeport. A simple wooden banner spanned the gap caused by the hallway, bearing an equally simple message.

SALVAGE DISTRICT

The pair passed beneath the makeshift sign and through a short, featureless corridor. On the opposite side was another vast, echoing area like the marketplace they had just left. However, the Salvage District was organized a little differently, in that it seemed to lack almost any sense of organization at all.

Large heaps of scrap and spare parts littered the floor space, often spilling over and under simple rope barriers. The lengths of brightly colored tape or cord did nothing to prevent overflow between the wares of two neighboring dealers. A good number of the more stable merchants managed to grab spaces embedded along the walls of the district. These looked more like legitimate shops, but even then, given the nature of their merchandise, they all shared a similar, shoddy quality. Most of Fox's attention was placed on these shops; his destination lay somewhere along the wall.

The people in the district possessed a certain quality about them. The stereotypes surrounding used-parts salesmen were definitely stereotypes for a reason, and Fox and Miyu had to defend themselves from a number of aggressive vendors as they threaded their way through the middle of the floor. The foot traffic was considerably sparser than the marketplace they had left, which surprisingly turned out to be a negative for the mercenaries; the lack of other customers meant that every salesman they even made eye contact with focused all of their attention on them.

Fox and Miyu beat a hasty retreat to the nearest wall, opting instead to take the long way around the district. Along the way, they passed a group of utility docking bays for cargo shuttles and the like. The first of these shuttles took the pair by surprise as it glided straight into the district from the vacuum, passing through the magnetic barrier of a docking window and landing in one of the zones marked off by rope. Fox mused that it made sense to allow direct landing here and not elsewhere in the station; some of the pieces of salvage for sale could only be transported on something as large as a shuttle.

Finally, Fox spotted a rusty old sign touting the words _Rishad's Repairables_ in bright neon lights. With Miyu just a step behind him, he made a beeline for the storefront shop. There was no door; just a double wide doorway to allow larger products to pass in and out of the store easily. The mercenaries stepped inside the sound-canceling threshold and were immediately met by an impressive sight.

Rishad's Repairables, unbeknownst to the pair, had a reputation for efficiency, and it showed in the layout of the shop. Bits and parts of various ships were organized by type and vehicle make, all with little signs filled with information placed beneath each piece. A host of thick catalogs lay on the counter near the register, consisting of all of the larger or extraneous merchandise not present in the storefront itself. The shelves were well kept, and the store had an atmosphere of professionalism about it. Grease stains and smears of lubricant were kept to minimum.

Fox smiled. Slippy sure knew how to pick out the diamond in the rough.

And then the attendant came out.

The feline was dressed in an oil-smudged, well worn mechanic's jumpsuit, sleeveless, although it was clearly not initially designed that way. It was open midway down her chest, allowing the undershirt beneath to show through. A clipboard was in her hand, and she was casually running down a list of sorts, hashing certain boxes with a carbon pencil. Smears of industrial grease and other substances crisscrossed her face and exposed fur. And she was pink.

Very pink.

A checkered bandana covered her short-cut, bleach-white head of hair, though a few errant strands hung out. As she reached the counter, she placed the clipboard down and braced herself against the surface. Making a confused sound, she tapped the pencil rapidly against one of the items on the checklist. She was apparently oblivious to the pair who just entered the storefront.

Fox was in shock.

"K…katt?" he stuttered, unable to believe it was her.

"That's what it says, chief," she replied with a sigh, tapping the nametag sown into right breast of her jumpsuit with her pencil. She didn't even look up from the clipboard. "Can I help you?"

Fox was silent. Didn't she recognize him?

Katt noticed the stretch of silence and looked up at the vulpine, square in his eyes. Her face registered no sign of recognition.

"…Can I_ help_ you?" she asked, flicking her gaze to Miyu. Tedium came through in her voice.

Suddenly, Fox smirked. Of course she didn't recognize him. The dye. The disguises. Then his smirk increased, though he quickly covered it. He could have some fun with this.

"Er, yeah," he began, clearing his throat and trying to deepen his voice. "We're uh, we're looking for some people and heard you might know them."

If Miyu was confused, which she was, she thankfully didn't show it.

Katt's demeanor took a turn for the defensive. She put down the pencil and crossed her arms, giving the fox with a vaguely familiar voice her full attention as she took a step back. Her hips locked in a standoffish manner.

When she didn't say anything, Fox went on.

"Ms. Monroe, it's come to our attention that you once made regular contact with a group of mercenaries known as Star Fox. We were-"

"Aw hell," she muttered, pulling a small, holdout pistol from a hidden pocket inside her open jumpsuit. She leveled it at the pair, rapidly switching her aim between them. She raised her voice. "Who are you guys? Bounty Hunters?"

"Whoa, Katt," Fox stammered, giving up the act. It had backfired much faster than he anticipated. "No, no, it's-"

"'Cuz I'm getting pretty freakin' tired of you guys harassing me." She cocked the hammer on the tiny weapon, now focusing it solely on Fox. "I'll tell you the same thing I told every other shit-skimming mark chaser who's come by looking for those guys. I haven't seen them for over a year now, I haven't talked to them in just as long, and I have no idea where they are. So go ahead n' get the _fuck _outta this store, and leave me the hell alone! I mean hell, do I have to actually _shoot _one of you guys before you take the hint?"

"Katt, hold on," Fox continued to stutter, raising one hand in the air and reaching towards her with the other. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Miyu's hand slowly edging for her own holdout weapon, held in place against her lower back by her belt. It had been given back to the lynx by Falco after she came aboard the _Great Fox_. Fox had to end this now. "Katt, it-I, it's me, Fox. F-fox McCloud. This…this is just dye-"

Katt's brow furrowed under her bandana as she squinted at the brown vulpine before her. Her first instinct was to cuss him out for assuming her stupid, but there was something holding her back. So she probed. "Fox?" Her pistol remained primed, but her face became a little softer.

Fox's mind raced. She'd be expecting proof.

"Uh…" he said, blanking. He saw the feline's expression begin to harden again. Doubt was clearly creeping into her mind. Miyu's hand now rested firmly on the handle of her own weapon, ready to whip it out at a moment's notice.

"Zoness!" he finally spat out. "Remember Zoness? You fought with us! You helped us take down that sub-"

Katt raised an eyebrow and stopped him. "That doesn't mean anything; you could've lived there. Vids of me and Star Fox were all over the news. Hell, that's probably why you're here right now."

"Yeah," Fox added, reminiscing and somehow managing to keep his voice from wavering, "They called us a 'Forward Cornerian Task Force.' Those conceited army stiffs couldn't let us share the spot-"

He stopped when he noticed the deadpan stare Katt was shooting him. This topic wouldn't get him anywhere. So he switched it up. "Er, but then you chewed Falco out something fierce if I remember right. Landed with us afterward, gave him a solid slapping around, and then took off. I can't tell you how surprised we were you showed up again in Sector Z."

Katt froze. The color drained from her cheeks, and her expression and posture began to drop. To Fox, it looked as though she had just seen a ghost. Her eyes glossed over and shadows danced in front of her eyes as long dormant memories flooded into her mind. It lasted only a few moments though, and soon another side of the feline showed through; the side Fox remembered.

"Fox!" she cried, dropping her pistol, circling the counter and practically pouncing him with an embrace. Somehow he kept his footing. "I didn't even recognize you in…oh." When she let go of him, she noticed streaks of the brown coloring on his cheeks dripping to the floor. Bits of his natural orange began to show through. Katt stared for a second and suddenly giggled, wiping her own cheek. She showed him the smear of oily substance on her fingers.

"Um, engine degreaser. Sorry about your mascara there, Tiger." She giggled again.

Fox chuckled and resisted the urge to wipe away the dripping dye; it would just wipe the degreaser around. He did take the offered rag from Katt's back pocket and dab it dry though.

"So what're you doing here, anyway?" she asked, cocking her head to the side with a grin. "You wouldn't guess how much people have been hassling me since they posted that bounty on you guys. Which certainly explains that ridiculous getup you've got going there. All the sudden interest's made me a bit jump-"

Katt paused, suddenly aware of Miyu watching the abrupt appearance of Fox and Katt's friendship with a visible mix of shock and amusement. Miyu locked eyes with the slightly shorter feline and maintained her expression, causing Katt to cock her head to the side again, this time in confusion. But then her eyes suddenly widened as though she had just stumbled upon a tremendous secret.

"Oh Foxie, this isn't…," she began, sniggering and raising a hand to her mouth, "I mean, you two aren't-"

"No! H-her? No!" Fox sputtered, laughing blatantly before realizing the rudeness of it. He quickly regained his composure. "I mean, no, nothing like that. Katt, this is Miyu, our newest recruit. Miyu, Katt's an old friend of mine."

Katt kept her grin but offered her hand to the lynx, "Nice to meet you Miyu. I'm, um, sorry about that."

Miyu beamed back, though Fox could spot a hidden bit of her trademark resentment in the expression. He was beginning to think he'd be the only one to have ever seen a genuine smile from her. "Don't worry about it."

Katt continued, gesturing towards the vulpine, "It's just _this_ guy…how long ago was that one vixen? Farrah…Flora…Fay? …Oh, I uh…I should probably stop talking." Her expression quickly fell. Her eyes roamed the floor for a bit before reigniting the original conversation. "But yeah, I take it you didn't stop by just to shop?"

"Actually, we did," Fox laughed, choosing to block out the dropped line of discussion. "A certain toad told us someone here owed him and that he wanted to collect. Never told us it was _you_ he did a favor for though."

"Oh, yeah," Katt responded, dragging out the first syllable and rocking back on the heels of her work boots. "He's a quiet little man, but that kid can do some amazing things with a computer."

"You're telling me," Fox said, smiling. "What'd he do, if you don't mind me asking?"

Katt leaned forward, lowering her voice to a whisper. Clearly there was someone else in the store she was afraid might overhear. "Let's just say Ms. Monroe needed to disappear for awhile." She tapped the nametag on her jumpsuit. After _Katt, _the smaller name _Anderson _was emblazoned in red cursive on a white patch. "I found the physical documentation and that whole deal alright, but I was having trouble finding a reliable hacker for the digital side of things. I had almost forgotten about Slippy. But I was fighting with that jackass birdie of yours again – no offense – and Slip came up, and it just clicked I guess."

She shrugged and returned to a normal speaking volume, leaning back and crossing her arms. "I was flat broke at the time, so I promised him I'd pay him back however I could when I got the chance."

Miyu stared incredulously at the feline. Something Katt said had piqued her interest, and she couldn't help the words coming to her lips. "So wait…I take it you and Falco…?"

"Were an item? Unfortunately," Katt completed, laughing as the lynx's disbelieving look grew. "Oh, trust me hon, if you've been around that _child_ for more than a minute, then I can tell you it was _everything _you though it was. I've just met you, and I can guarantee there are two women in this room who think he's a jackass."

As Fox watched the two, he realized he'd have to recall his earlier thoughts about Miyu and smiling. The smirk she was now sporting seemed pretty legitimate to him. It matched Katt's expression.

"I thought so; you know, I think you and I are going to be friends Miyu. But _anyway_," Katt finished, stressing the word as she brought the conversation full circle, turning back to Fox. "I take it you're here to collect on Slippy's debt?"

The vulpine smiled and nodded, "Sure am. Slip had something in mind for a project of his that he thought you could help us with." Fox looked up, sounding out the words as he tried to remember the phrasing correctly, "A _Corvette_-grade, _Energy _weapon's battery. Does that sound like something, um, real?"

Katt laughed and motioned towards an open doorway in the back of the store. "It does, actually. Here, come on back to the garage. We've got a few lying around back here somewhere."

As she led the two back, she stopped for a moment and bent down to snatch up her small pistol from the floor. She popped back up and cocked open the double barreled holdout weapon, showing the empty chambers to Fox.

"I didn't scare you back there did I?" She giggled. "Haven't fired a weapon since…well, since I hung out with you guys. And I'm kinda planning on keeping it that way."

Fox smiled and chuckled, though as they made their way behind the counter and through the door to the shop's garage, he felt Miyu draw closer behind him and drop her voice.

"Mine actually had bullets in it," she whispered.

* * *

Linka placed the empty mug down in the command chair's holder. For a brief moment, she could imagine various members of Star Fox's original crew doing the very same thing on any number of boring occasions in the past. Of course, those mercenaries probably had things to do to be bored by. And those mercenaries probably didn't sprawl out sideways across the armrests. And if they did, they probably didn't find it comfortable.

Maybe it was her smaller frame, but she found herself so much at ease that after awhile, she started having trouble keeping her eyes open. She wondered as she closed her eyes when the supposed energy boost the caf rations were famous for would kick in. The coyote was pretty sure drowsiness wasn't an intended side effect.

Just as Linka's eyes fluttered shut, a sharp pulse of sound raced through the bridge. Her eyelids snapped open and she sat up in surprise. In the silence that followed the audio burst, she thought for a moment that she must have imagined it somehow, perhaps as the start of some caffeine-altered dream. She glanced toward Slippy, who was still moving his fingers frantically along his keyboard at his console. That was still the same at least.

His face, however, was different. Instead of the slightly amused expression he wore while working on his decoding, he bore the twisted expression of fear, teetering on the brink of terror. His screen no longer sported line upon line of symbols and characters; it had been replaced by the slowly rotating wireframe of a small spacecraft, lagging and stuttering into static every few moments.

All it took was a single word of denial to get Linka up and out of her chair. Another loud klaxon sounded once as she rushed to Slippy's side, placing one hand on the back of his chair and leaning down until her face was level with his screen.

"W-we've got company," Slippy croaked, stabbing a stubby finger at the outlined shape on his console. The shuttle was sharp and angry in shape, the honed keel of a nautical vessel jutting out in front. The angled hull was flanked on both sides by stumpy little wings.

"Do you know who it is?" Linka asked, already beginning to feel a sinking feeling come over her.

Slippy shook his head. "No, but I've seen that shuttle type before. P-pirates use it for…boarding."

Linka's stomach began crawling. Next to the wireframe, a surprisingly small number was falling rapidly. The ship was practically on the _Great Fox's_ doorstep already. "Why is the image so bad?" she asked.

"It's the shuttle," he replied, looking at her. His eyes were wide. "The V-venomians used that model a lot during the Lylat War. It has a jammer onboard."

Linka looked at him. "We can't call for help? Or run?"

His nod was solemn and unmistakable. Either option would be pointless.

The coyote stood upright and tensed as a shiver ran down her spine.

The warning siren picked up in frequency, sounding twice, and then four times as often as the distance meter on Slippy's screen continued to fall. Slippy had turned back to his screen, and continued to type furiously on his keyboard, bringing up and subsequently closing a multitude of information screens on his console. A number of times before being closed, the windows featured the virtual, iconic representation of a locking mechanism latching. Slippy was wasting no time as he quickly shut down the _Great Fox_.

A tiny voice inside Linka made its presence known as she watched, whispering amidst the warning klaxons that it could still be a friendly craft. It insisted she calm down and let the possibility pacify her. But she knew it couldn't be the case. The illusion of safety was suddenly tempting as the realities of hostile boarding hit her full force, but her reason weathered a mental storm that left her visibly shaken. Her hands began to shudder, even as she looked down at them and tried to force them to stop.

A final, punctuated keystroke brought her attention back to Slippy. He looked at her again.

"Linka, I…I don't know what to do," he sputtered, "Fox and the team weren't supposed to be back for another hour. Even without that jammer, I still wouldn't be able to reach them through all the asteroids and…and…"

He trailed off. She didn't say a word. The sirens continued.

"The bridge has h-heavy blast doors, but there's no telling how long that will hold them," Slippy added feebly. He started rubbing his hands together. "We'd be safe for awhile..."

Linka imagined the scenario. For all her wishes to be accepted by the crew as a legitimate member, she couldn't deny the fact that she was no foot soldier. And Slippy, for all of his experience with technology, couldn't hope to fight with a weapon. Hunkering down in the bridge and hoping the blast doors would hold long enough for Bill and Fox and the rest of them to return seemed like the only logical response. Behind the reinforced sheets of steel and alloy, Slippy and her would…

She stopped. Her eyes suddenly refocused.

"_No."_

She saw herself and Slippy huddled behind the resilient doors as they slowly began to glow orange from the raider's arc torches. She saw the horror on both of their faces as the red metal began to melt and peel back like an orange, revealing hungry faces on the other side. They backed away from the failing entrance, retreating helplessly across the bridge as the hole was made large enough to fit through. Her mind's eye watched as they broke in and swarmed the pair.

Linka's jaw set. Her mind was blank again. She knew what pirates did with captives. She wasn't going to go like that. Trapped and powerless, awaiting her fate with idle hands.

"What is it?" Slippy asked, watching her with awe. He had seen that expression before. It reminded him of Fox. Linka wasn't responding. "Linka, what-"

The coyote suddenly bolted towards the double doors to the bridge. They parted in anticipation of her, and she dashed through, coming to a halt directly on the threshold. She looked back at Slippy.

"Where do you keep your guns?"

* * *

The door opened with a _swish_ and Linka stepped into the room, slapping the light switch.

The room, about the size of one of the _Great _Fox's bedrooms, was square and open. Mesh lockers and open air racks lined the perimeter, flush against the wall, and a couple of small metallic crates dotted a table in the middle. The various storage containers were a hodge-podge of styles and states of cleanliness, indicating Star Fox's fluctuating state of wealth. They spoke of the team's periods of luxury and equipment expansion, and of their falls from economic grace.

But right now, they mostly spoke of sheer poverty.

The racks were utterly bare, devoid of any scrap of equipment or firearm. The boxes on the table were open and apparently empty. Linka suddenly remembered how they had had to abandon most of their weaponry during their last outing on Corneria. And chances were, whatever they managed to grab as they scrambled from their safe house was being carried by the rest of the team right now on Shoana.

In despair, she rushed from locker to locker, flinging them open one by one.

Her nerves were beginning to get the better of her, and she cursed out loud.

"No, there has to be something here..."

Finally, in the last locker she opened, the lights of the makeshift armory shone down upon a small, dingy submachine gun. Her heart jumped as she bent down and snatched it up. She brought it over to the table.

Small was probably the best way to describe the worn weapon that sat on the metallic countertop. It was physically tiny for its weapon class, barely larger than one of the pistols she had seen Falco cleaning earlier. There was enough room along the stunted barrel to fit another hand for aiming, but only barely, and only because of her smaller paws. The black paint was splotchy at best, revealing the gunmetal grey beneath. The oils of someone else's skin had apparently worn away the material.

She struggled with the clip of the weapon for a second before it finally slid free. Much to her relief, it was full. As she slid it back into the gun, she quickly spun and returned to the locker where she found it. Her hunch paid off, and hidden in the shadows she found an extra magazine of ammunition.

She nearly dropped it though as a voice came over the loud speakers she didn't realize were in the ceiling of the room.

"L-linka! Can you hear me? There should be a com link somewhere in the room. L-look in the boxes." Slippy's voice was too soft to truly boom, but in the small room, it was a little too loud for comfort.

Linka stepped back towards the middle of the room and placed the items she had found so far on the table. Her hands rooted around the crates on the surface, coming up empty twice before finding a small device in the final one.

"Press the 'home' button on the side of it and put it in your ear," Slippy's voice continued over the room's speakers, as if he were able to see that she was now holding the device.

Linka complied, finding the earpiece that made up the body of the tiny item and depressing the small button labeled 'home.' She fitted the headset into her right ear, looking around the upper corners of the room as she did so. She couldn't spot any cameras. A tiny microphone protruded from the earpiece, extending halfway along her jaw to her mouth.

"Slippy?" she said softly, lifting her eyes as if he were located in the ceiling above her.

A period of static briefly fizzed before the toad's voice sounded through, mostly clear.

"I-I'm here," he said, sounding just as unsure as he had before Linka ran out on him. "We'll be able to keep in contact this way; the _Great Fox_'s hull should filter out most of the jamming from their shuttle."

Linka nodded and was about to respond when a pair of loud, bone-shaking explosions rocked solidly through the carrier, throwing her forward to her knees. Her nerves already spiked, she cried out in surprise as the metal deck rushed to meet her, though she managed to catch herself in time.

Slippy's squeal of alarm exceeded her own through the com link that had held fast to her ear. Linka reached up and pushed it gently against her head.

"Slippy; are you okay? What _was _that?"

"T-t-t-they're bombing the back door!" he stammered, unable to keep his voice from screeching. "The rear docking bay door, they're going to destroy it!"

Linka listened to the sound of rapid keystrokes as she picked herself up off the floor, desperately trying to get her skipping heart under control. She quickly spotted the submachine gun and ammunition on the ground and grabbed them.

She had just regained her composure when a loud rumbling filled the silence left by the explosions. This sound, however, originated from within the _Great Fox_. Unlike other noises she had heard during her stay with Star Fox though, the metallic growling sounded harsh and forced.

"I'm opening the bay door," Slippy's voice in Linka's ears said, sounding just a little more restrained. "If they keep b-bombing it, they could miss and hit the main engines. At least now they won't…"

Slippy trailed off as he must have realized how pointless the action was. Why was he even trying to save the ship? They were about to lose the _Great Fox_ altogether. And probably more.

Linka breathed out slowly, letting her lungs deflate completely. Her eyes closed and she gathered herself. Her hands were still shaking, but the weight in their grip felt right.

"_Not yet we haven't_."

The coyote cocked back the firing pin on her weapon and slipped the extra magazine into the waistband of her pants, at the small of her back.

"Slip," she said quietly. Her voice had a certain calmness about it that surprised her. "I'm going to get ready for them, and I'm going to need your help. Can you access the ship's lighting from there?"

* * *

The fox clipped his breathing apparatus into place around his muzzle. As he began tasting the endlessly recycled air of the filter tanks on his back, he donned the rest of his combat gear. A half-helmet snapped into place with the breath mask, covering the eyes and ears of the vulpine with a clear, fully sealed material. It was uncomfortable at first, but soon his body became used to the tiny, completely isolated bubble of atmosphere his equipment had created for himself.

Around him in the small interior space of the shuttle, his three teammates were doing the same, adjusting the seals on their various components with care. It was a lot to go through, but then, so was a full decompression. When backed into corners, bounties tended to get desperate with their tactics. The fox had witnessed this particular form of desperation first hand a few targets back. The poor sap of a mark had waited until most of the boarding team was on his ship before shunting the entirety of his vessel's air supply into the cold vacuum.

That particular target had failed to check the seals on his ship's internal structure though, and ended up spacing himself as well, locked behind a series of ultimately pointless blast doors. The vulpine bounty hunter had lost most of his team at the time that day; he wasn't about to make the same mistake twice.

"Hey Ace, why d'ya suppose they opened the doors for us?" one of his team asked as she cocked her assault weapon. The leopard hefted a bag of equipment after slinging her gun.

"Yeah," a male puma added. "I thought you said this ship would be empty?"

"Not empty," Ace replied, "_Nearly _empty. Boss said he has another team shadowing the rest of Star Fox at Shoana. They probably just left the toady here to babysit."

"So why'd he open the door?" the female leopard repeated.

"Who knows?" Ace shrugged, readying his own weapon. "Maybe he thinks he can buy his way out with kindness."

They all laughed at that.

"What if they got help, and there's an ambush waiting for _us_?" the fourth member of the party asked. The raccoon's eyes stared intently through his visor. He was clearly seriously considering the question.

"Who would they hire? They're independent mercenaries, so they're probably poor as shit. And if you got hired by individuals with fifty thousand credit bounties on _each _of their heads, how much would they have to pay you to _not _turn around and turn them in?"

The raccoon considered the point for a moment. "True enough."

"Right," Ace said, nodding his head. "If there aren't any more questions, let's do this. Remember, try to take the little fella alive."

* * *

"Do you want to go over it one more time?"

"N-no; I think I got it alright. Are you sure you don't want my pistol?"

"I should be alright; if this doesn't work, then it's not like a handgun is going to save me. Besides, if I take out enough of them, you might be able to clean up."

"…The door to the docking bay is locked, but they'll probably be able to crack it. W-we haven't updated the codes around here for awhile now."

"That's okay. Just be ready to cut the lights when I tell you to. …If you don't hear me check in after a few minutes, don't wait for me; find a way to get to the bridge and lock the doors. Maybe everyone'll get back in time to help."

"Ah-okay. Linka…be careful."

"I will. Thanks Slip."

* * *

The _Great Fox's _secondary hanger was located just above the carrier's main bank of thrusters. Due to this positioning, it was forced to support a floor space much smaller than the main docking bay, slung underneath the vessel. Also due to the positioning, the hanger was much more narrow, meaning that if one managed to squeeze multiple ships in the space, one would be forced to line them up single file. Without the clutter of the primary bay though, it wasn't impossible to imagine the less-used hanger with a pair of small fighters in it.

However, its sole occupant for the time being was a larger, recently arrived shuttle.

The craft had disgorged its four occupants moments ago. After careful sweep of the immediate area, they had gathered near the doorway to the rest of the carrier. It was here that one of the four was kneeling at the disassembled door pad, wire-strippers in one hand, and a connected computing device in the other. The other three looked anxious.

"C'mon man, hurry up," the raccoon urged, his voice muffled by the breathing mask around his mouth. "I'm getting a weird feeling about this place."

"_Oh_, why didn't you _say_ you wanted this done quickly? Well allow me to speed up then," the puma sneered, glaring at the raccoon.

"Alright, alright, sorry. Jeez."

The puma growled and returned to his hacking tool.

"Boj," the fox said, talking to the raccoon, "I think you're gonna take rear guard on this one. Stay back with the shuttle until one of us comes and gets you."

The raccoon sighed with disappointment. Babysitting the entry craft was usually a job left for rookies. His jumpiness must've worried Ace. "Gotcha."

"Got it," the puma reported as a heavy metal _thunk _sounded from inside the door he was hacking. He detached his device and replaced it in his pocket. Holding the leads of two wires, he turned towards the fox. "Good to go, chief."

"Do it."

A spark jumped between the two exposed bits of wire as the puma touched them together, and the door in front of them slid open. Ace peered down the corridor, his automatic weapon raised.

Beyond the open threshold, a hallway stretched off a little ways before dead-ending into a pair of heavy blast doors. A couple of smaller doors flanked the hanger door that had just been breached. Other than that, the hallway was barren of points of interest.

Taking the lead himself, Ace stepped slowly through the doorway into the hallway, careful to sweep both sides just inside the doorframe. He kept walking, taking care to make sure each footstep landed with as little unnecessary noise as possible. Without turning to look, he could hear the puma and leopard following him in single file. Counting on his teammates to perform their assigned tasks, he forged ahead, analyzing the situation as he went.

The corridor was bright and casually lit, making for easy enough working conditions. Chances were the target was locked away behind the blast doors at the end of the hall. But chances were also that the toad was expecting an intruder to think that way, thus making the hall a perfect place for…

The lights went out.

Ace heard both doors on either side of the docking bay door swish open.

More importantly though, the rumbling of blast doors parting pricked his ears.

Without hesitation, he dove to a prone position and began firing down the corridor towards the bridge's opening doors. It was sheer reflex. His team's weapons joined in, and soon there were four streams of fire stretching blindly into the pitch blackness.

"Hold your fire!" he barked out, ending the cacophony of weapon retorts echoing off the walls.

As soon as it was silent, he fished a small flashlight from his belt and managed to attach it to his rifle after some blind probing. Once he felt it slide into place, he thumbed the activation stud, and suddenly the inky darkness was dispelled by a brilliant beam of light. Three more soon joined the first as his team caught on.

They were trained down the hall just in time to catch a short shadow disappear into what could only be a stairwell, judging from the unique pitter-patter of steps that followed.

"Everyone alright?" he asked, turning around.

From kneeling positions on either side of him, and from behind the open doorframe back towards the hanger, he received three affirmatives.

"Did he even shoot at us?" the leopard asked.

"I knew this wasn't so cut and dry," the raccoon commented.

"Relax Boj," Ace reassured, "The little froggy's just trying to mess with us. Keep it locked down here, alright?"

Boj nodded.

"Good. Let's go." Ace motioned towards the other two, and they crept on into the darkness of the _Great Fox_, led by the beams of their flashlights.

One by one, they threaded towards the threshold to the stairwell, just outside the open bridge doors. They proceeded much more carefully once they reached the point of the toad's disappearance. Once the immediate area was swept by flashlights, one of the three stayed behind and entered the bridge while the other two disappeared down the stairs. Their careful footsteps eventually disappeared altogether.

Boj stood resolute for a minute or two, determined not to let his mind wander as the darkness settled around him. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, unable to find a position comfortable after fifteen seconds of use. Eventually, he settled against the doorframe, leaning on the metal with his weapon held loosely in his hands. The pool of light cast by his clipped flashlight illuminated a small disk of the floor by his feet. His breathing apparatus cycled.

He sighed.

* * *

"_Now or never Link_."

The man's flashlight was like a lighthouse in the utter blackness. She couldn't miss.

"_Don't hesitate."_

Her breath was as light and shallow as she could make it. She was sure he'd hear her at any moment.

"_Stop hesitating."_

She gripped her weapon with both hands. She could feel it shaking. Why was she stalling? She had killed before. She had killed plenty before. Just…never face to face.

"_Shoot, run, hide. Shoot run, hide. Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot."_

Her head pulsed, and her eyes flashed.

It wasn't flawless, but she swung out from behind the open closet door and aimed just above the beam of the flashlight, no more than a few meters away. She heard the sharp inhale of the man in her sights. A voice from somewhere inside her cried out that she was about to take a life. But it was too late to stop.

Before Linka could blink, the weapon in her hands spat wildfire, emptying half the clip of ammunition in the time it took to pull her finger from the firing stud. Bullets pinged off the metal bulkheads of the hallway, drowning out the clinking of shells striking the floor. The barrel flashes gave off a strobe effect, allowing the coyote to witness the man's demise in visceral, stop-frame motion.

The hallway fell quiet. The man slumped to the floor.

Linka lowered her gun. Her heart was racing like she was in a dogfight. Her victim lay below her, the flashlight on his gun settling and casting its light through the open hanger door. He was motionless.

"Boj!" A female voice shouted from the bridge. Linka's head snapped towards the extremely faint silhouette, unable to make out anything more in the blackness. The light from the flashlight had ruined any night vision she had accumulated since the _Great Fox_'s internal lights were cut. "You okay?"

Linka turned and dashed into the hanger, expecting a hail of bullets to cut her down at any moment. She wasn't wrong. And it came too soon.

Just as the coyote thought she had slipped behind the doorframe, a slug tore through the muscle of her calf, sending her sprawling to the floor. The doorframe protected her from further fire, but for a moment, the sheer surprising pain pinned her down. She flipped onto her back, clutching her wounded leg. Her teeth bit down harshly on her lip until she tasted blood, but she managed to keep from crying out. So she heard it when rapid footsteps began approaching from the hallway.

Linka instinctively tried to push herself away from the door with her good foot, hastily sliding across the deck as though retreating from a monster. She had to get away from the dead man's flashlight, shining light into the hanger. She hadn't made it a meter from where she fell though, when her tail brushed up against something small and metallic. The wounded coyote reached back and snatched it up without breaking eye contact with the hanger door.

Just as she brought the gun to bear on the doorframe, the source of the footsteps appeared, sprinting into the docking bay. The flashlight on the ground outlined the newcomer perfectly.

Linka barely let her second victim realize her tactical blunder as she unloaded the rest of her weapon's magazine. The gun rattled wildly in her hands, but she tracked the raider well enough, and the leopard crumpled to the floor.

The weapon continued to _click _on empty until Linka finally released the trigger.

All was quiet. Except for her breathing.

Linka swallowed hard. With the immediate threat gone for the moment, she took the time to probe her wound, wincing and nearly crying out again as her fingers touched the holes. It was a good sign at least; the bullet had punched straight through her lower leg and out the other side, eating nothing but muscle along the way. The bleeding wasn't bad all things considered, but she lamented the lack of anything to dress the injury with.

Tiny convulsions wracked her muscles. All of the adrenaline pumping through her veins began to pool without a physical exertion for an outlet, and the weight of her situation began to weigh on her. She had to get up. She had to stop thinking about it.

Refusing to drop her weapon again, Linka struggled to her feet using her other hand for leverage, careful not to put any pressure on her wounded leg. Once she could stand up straight, she tried gradually shifting her balance to both feet. The leg held, but the coyote couldn't stop a quiet curse from escaping her lips. Her ears pricked.

For a moment she was confused when she heard another set of quickly paced boots ascending the stairs down the hall from the hanger. It only took a moment to regain presence of mind though, and she quickly sized up her situation. Glancing around the docking bay, the only source of cover Linka could spot was the shuttle the boarding party had arrived in. Twisting her body every off step, she began limping towards it, not knowing what she was going to do, but knowing that she wasn't about to bet on the raiders' tactical stupidity twice.

As she rounded the back of the shuttle, so that the craft was between herself and the hallway door, the footsteps from the corridor suddenly stopped. Linka listened closely. They began again, but much more cautiously. The static flashlight from before abruptly turned off, leaving only the curious light from the new presence. Whoever it was must've found the bodies.

Linka squeezed her weapon with both hands. She suddenly wished she could just throw it to the ground and give herself up. As if they'd take her alive after killing two of their team. The fact that she had just gotten lucky twice in a row rose in volume in her head. Chances were this third person would be taking his time. He was probably well trained. And she had never been in a true gun battle before now. Chances were, her chances of coming out alive weren't very good at all.

But, strangely enough, it was this thought that calmed the young coyote.

"_I'm dead either way," _she thought, carefully removing the empty clip from her gun. _"Why not go out in style?"_

She reached back behind her and slid the extra magazine from her waistband, placing it into the waiting slot. It clicked into place, but the footsteps didn't break rhythm, so Linka assumed he must not have heard it.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wondered how Slippy was faring. She didn't dare speak into her com unit, and she had heard nothing but static since the gunfire started.

The raider was definitely in the docking bay by now; Linka could see the sweeping beam from his flashlight probe the walls off to either side of the shuttle. The shaft of light arced along the smooth metal until it reached the massive, open bay doors and dissolved into the Meteos asteroid field. It then repeated the process on the opposite side. A slight shadow of the beam appeared on the magnetic field of the hanger each time, highlighting the barrier holding the _Great Fox_'s atmosphere in. The coyote couldn't see any way to sneak up on him. It would blatantly obvious where she was coming from; there were only two ways to go.

Linka began to place the empty clip where the new clip had been when she stopped. In the non-existent light, she looked down at it in her hands. Thoughts of old tactical lectures at the Cornerian Flight Academy drifted into her head.

"_Misdirection is key in a dogfight; if you can hold the enemy's attention on one point, they'll be blind to every other attack vector…"_

That was it. Linka wondered if she would be able to move quickly enough to capitalize on it though.

Without waiting to let thoughts of doubt creep up on her, she tossed the empty clip high over the shuttle, letting it hang in the air a good few seconds. In the darkness of the high-ceilinged room, the raider didn't even see the small black object hurtling through the air.

In the few moments of hang time, Linka moved as quietly as she could to one corner of the shuttle's rear, barely pausing before limping forward into the open, towards the hallway door.

Just before she came into view of the intruder, the clip landed behind him, clattering as it struck metal and bouncing wildly into the hallway.

Startled, the puma spun around towards the source of the noise, fearing for a split second that whoever had killed his comrades had snuck up behind him. His flashlight illuminated only an empty hallway.

However, the same flashlight led Linka's sights straight to him in the otherwise pitch black hanger. He never saw her.

Too strained to even bring the gun to her shoulder, the coyote unloaded from the hip, coating the entire vicinity of the hanger door with munitions. Enough found their mark to put him down, but the atrocious hit rate chewed through her entire remaining clip. The familiar _click_ of an empty magazine sounded at the same time the intruder's body hit the floor.

She carried straight through, suddenly encouraged and emboldened by the success of her trick. Dropping her empty weapon, she limped to her freshly killed enemy and snatched up his. The rifle was a bit more bulky than her previous gun, but she found a way to hold it comfortably enough as she made her way to the hanger door.

If her ears were telling her the truth, there had been four people in the hallway back when Slippy set off his diversion. Which meant there was still one more somewhere in the bowels of the _Great Fox_, still trying to track the toad down. There had to be; she hadn't heard anyone else approaching from the stairwell.

As Linka crossed the threshold into the corridor, her vision suddenly exploded.

Apparently without reason, she was looking up from the ground, a flashlight that wasn't there before trained directly on her eyes.

Her head was swimming. She wondered briefly if someone had poured water on her left temple. It felt wet.

The flashlight moved aside, and she could barely make out the silhouette of a pistol in its place.

Whoever was holding both instruments sounded angry.

"You're _damn _lucky you're worth more alive than dead, Linka Pyrokanzia," the voice snarled. The figure behind the weapon stopped for a minute, apparently in thought. Linka could've sworn she saw him shrug. "Although, it does look like my share of your reward just became a hundred percent. And a hundred percent of thirty five thousand ain't bad."

Linka heard a gunshot, and then nothing else.

* * *

**RedBay**: No worries my friend; take your time.

**chaos Leader**: First of all, I'm very glad to hear you're enjoying the story. I decided to go the way I did (Friendship v. love, political intrigue v. heavy romance) for a few reasons. First, and for the same reason I didn't involve everyone's favorite blue vixen, it's been done and done to death. There's only so many ways a romance between two lead characters can go. Which is the second reason; it's far too predictable. For me, for the reader, for everyone. Now, that's not to say everything's set in stone relationship wise. But you don't fall in love with someone who brained you with a heavy calibur wrench. Thanks again for the review. Get some sleep :)

And there we go. Chapter 24 should be coming up soonish (relative to other updates). Thanks for reading!

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	24. Chapter 24: Shoana Pt III

**XXIV: **_Shoana: Pt III_

"Sir."

"Hm? Major. What is it?"

"Sir, Admiral Gage requests your presence. He sounded…impatient."

"Oh? Now why ever would the good Admiral feel _impatient_?"

"Sir, I…"

"…Do you know why I requested you, Major Wilkins? As my assistant."

"Ah, no sir."

"I requested you from that station instead of your superior because you are a competent officer."

"…Thank you, s-"

"Not only do you understand everything that we have put in to motion, but you know how to push our goals forward. You were the one who posted the bounties on those intervening mercenaries a while back, yes? You were the one to speed up the capture of our fine subject here?"

"Yes sir, but I'm not sure why-"

"I tell you this because I want you to realize where I am coming from when I say that Admiral Gage is not a competent officer. The man does not realize what freedom we are truly moving towards. He still attaches value to the most minute of sacrifices we must unfortunately ask him for."

"…"

"Tell the good Admiral I will contact him shortly."

"Yes sir."

* * *

"The three of us met back during orientation at the General Academy, just before our first year began."

Jason Mierse reached up – he had to jump a little – and yanked down the chain metal screen from its slot above the door to his darkened store. It slid out a few centimeters but abruptly stopped. Jason tried several more times to grab enough purchase on the tiny bit of mesh showing, rattling the chains each time, but failed to get the mechanism to spool out anymore. Finally, the taller Falco stepped forward and smoothly yanked the screen free, allowing the artificial gravity of Shoana Freeport to pull it straight to the floor. It struck the deck with another clatter.

"Thanks Stretch," the grey furred fox said, offering a lopsided grin as he reached down with a key to secure the anti-theft screen to the ground. Jason sighed and stood upright after it was locked, shoving his hands into his freshly donned jacket. The brown leather garment was short-sleeved, as was the current trend in fashion. He spun around, motioning with his shoulder. "Alright, let's go."

The pair began walking at a leisurely pace, joining the thinning foot traffic through the station.

"You sure Billy's gonna be okay?" Jason asked. "He ran off real sudden-like back there."

"Yeah, he'll be fine," Falco replied, sticking his hands in his own jacket. He had trouble refraining from smiling; he took no small amusement with the knowledge that nobody walking past him knew that he had enough weapons to arm a military squad stuffed into a duffel bag slung around his shoulder. Courtesy of Jason. "We all came in one shuttle anyway, so it's not like he's going to end up anywhere else. He'll probably be back at the hanger."

"What if he takes off without you and your friends?" Jason offered, "That sort of distress can mess with a man's manner of thinking."

"Oh, we left one of our own back with the shuttle," Falco answered, smiling a little at the thought of Rhena forcibly holding Bill back from launching the craft. "He's not going anywhere without the rest of us."

"Ah," Jason replied. He was silent for awhile as they weaved around a closing clothing stall in the middle of one of the station's concourses. A small crowd of kids rushed across their path, chasing a single child grasping something tightly in his hand. It looked like a credit chip. The fox suddenly shook his head as he remembered what he had been talking about. "Oh, yeah, so Bill, Sophie and I met back at the General Miltary Academy. We musta been…what, thirteen that first year? Fourteen?"

"Fourteen," Falco stated, watching the mob of kids rush off with a smirk. "My buddy Fox and I met him later that year."

"Ah," Jason said, stretching the syllable, "You're Gen-grads too then, eh? When I heard Billy was caught up with mercenaries, I thought we were talking the sorta uncivilized folk that usually-"

"Nope," Falco cut him off. "No, we're straight Academy educated. Actually, the three of us all moved up to Flight Academy after we got out of Gen. And how'd you hear he was flying with us, anyway? Bounty posting?"

"I'll get to that in a second, friend. I've still gotta story to tell."

Falco shrugged. "Fair enough."

"Right. So, the three of us – Billy, Sophia and I, that is – met up during orientation, and pretty much hit it off right away. Ate lunch together, took classes together; the whole deal. Up until 'choosing year' came around, we were making all sorts of cute little plans to ensure we served in the same division together." Jason paused as Falco and he had to split up for a moment, each walking around opposite sides of an arguing couple in the middle of the corridor they had proceeded down.

The couple was fighting over some probably insignificant issue or another, gesturing wildly with their arms. Their voices carried a good long way down the hallway, making their presence known to Falco and Jason well before they were visible. Louder than their words though was their physical appearance. Both hares were dressed in simple, but stark white clothes, standing out in sharp contrast to the grimy, grey walls of the station. Both of them sported one long, standing ear of natural color, and one of bright red.

Falco raised an eyebrow at this last fact as it looked oddly familiar, but figured it was some sort of bonding thing between the two. The day had been full of little incidents like this, and he was quick to forget about it.

Jason continued once the couple was behind them.

"But then that third year came around and we had to choose specialties for which Graduate Academy we wanted. Sophie went combat medicine, I went combat support, and Billy went, well, Flight Academy like you said. I mostly lost contact with those two after that, but we wrote letters back and forth every once in awhile."

"So when did Bill and, _Sophie_, was it?" Falco asked, receiving a nod from Jason. "Yeah. When did Bill and Sophie get, ya know…fiancé'd up?"

"Well, I'm not sure if they ever dated back then in Gen Academy," Jason shrugged. "Or at least, if they did, they hid it pretty well from me. Never made me out to be the third wheel, I guess I'm trying to say. I always assumed Billy and I were both firmly entrenched in the 'friend zone' with Soph anywho. I mean she was certainly cute enough to make a go at, but I always found her a little too…_perky _for my tastes. Always smiling, always…ah, but you probably don't care about that."

Falco nodded evenly as they rounded a corner and the corridor spat them out into another cavernous space. Jason kept going, after a pause. The fox wasn't expecting the avian to answer so bluntly.

"Er, right. Well I should mention that they both stayed on Corneria for their Grad schools; I got shipped off to an exchange program with the Katinian Military. At some point before they graduated and I uh…well anyway, they invited me home during a mutual leave. When we met up, they told me they were engaged."

"Strange how he never told us," Falco said.

"They never told anyone else, I think," Jason replied. "I wouldn't be surprised if their units didn't know. I don't really know why they wanted to keep it such a secret, either. I mean, I know the military has a policy about separating serving spouses because of potential distraction from duty and all that, so I can understand not telling _them_…I dunno."

"Huh."

"Yeah."

The pair crossed through a threshold, leaving the virtually open-aired room behind them and entering a smaller, hub-type area. The ceiling of the hub curved into a dome, creating a perfect chamber for sounds to echo. Their footsteps in particular resounded around the room as Falco led Jason into a waiting elevator car. After pressing the correct button, the doors closed behind them and the car started its journey to the desired floor.

"So," Falco began again, "How did you get the job of watching over her?"

"Well, see now, I'm actually a little proud of that myself. When Bill suddenly got that bounty slapped on his head, it was pretty obvious that bounty hunters would be searching high and low for him and his. When you guys managed to stay off the map for a few weeks, they got creative. I figure, they thought that instead of searching every little nook and cranny for the rodents, they'd offer a little food and let them come out to feast."

"Hold some family hostage, nab 'em when they come looking."

The elevator slowed to a stop and the speakers issued a pleasant confirmation sound. The doors parted, admitting the pair access to their selected floor. They stepped off the car and began walking down the hallway. Jason had no idea which docking berth they were looking for, or how far down the corridor they were headed. Falco did. They had some time to walk.

"Right," Jason replied. "But see, trouble was, you've assembled yourself quite the unique crew. At least on the Cornerian side of things. Not a one of those three souls have surviving kin. Orphans, recent or lifelong, the whole lot."

Falco did a quick rundown in his mind. He knew easily enough that he himself was an orphan. Fox had once had parents; a pretty ideal life, actually, until just before the Lylat War broke out. But then things got very complicated, and unless you counted the MIA Peppy, the Star Fox leader had no living relatives, either. Falco was sure he heard Slippy mention family once. And Miyu's past was anyone's guess. So maybe it wasn't a complete wash for the expanded Star Fox crew being kinless. But it was close.

"Funny business that," Falco commented after the wheels in his mind stopped turning so far, unassumingly reflecting Jason's unique manner of speaking. "So I guess if family didn't exist to be ransomed, close friends would have to do. But didn't you say nobody knew about Bill and, um…"

"Ms. Sophia Arkanian."

"Yeah, her. You said nobody else knew about the two hooking up. Not even the Cornerian Military they both served."

"Well sure, but you've gotta remember, it's a question of incentives on the part of the searcher. The intelligence officer in charge of making sure everything's on the up and up romantically speaking doesn't get a bonus if he spots two soldiers giving each other the ol' flirty eyes as they pass in the halls. Nor does he get rewarded for catching little coded messages in seemingly businesslike correspondence mail. Therefore, he's not going to be looking too hard for something connecting him to her, especially if they're being reasonably careful. Which they were. But bounty hunters? They're a different story entirely. You ever do any man hunting work?"

Falco nodded with a knowing smile. "From time to time. Keeps food on the table sometimes."

"Exactly. _Exactly. _Then you know what I'm trying to say. Someone who's searching for a mark to turn in so they can eat, or even just for some extra cash, are going to look a lot harder and dig a lot deeper. Especially if the mark is carrying the sort of bounty you fellas happen to be sporting."

"Okay," Falco nodded, putting the pieces together. Their particular berth was approaching. "So once one of you two see Bill's bounty notice, you get in contact with each other. She takes leave, and goes into hiding for awhile…you keep in contact with her and stay low. Er, low_er_. Not sure how much lower you can get than selling weapons at a freeport. Everyone and their mother pushes guns on these stations."

Jason laughed and beamed at the avian, slapping the taller man on the back. "You must be the brains behind your crew my friend. That's exactly it."

Now it was Falco's turn to laugh. "Well, I appreciate it, but I know several people who would ah, _contest_ otherwise. One toad in particular."

They stopped at their doorway. It was already open. The grey fox looked up at Falco, who looked back and silently shook his head. Something wasn't quite right. Living with a bounty leant itself to precautionary survival, and every instinct the avian had picked up in the past few months was ringing loud as a bell in his head.

Falco smoothly pulled his revolver from its holster and slid up to the doorway, motioning for the unarmed Jason to stay behind him. Holding his weapon at the ready, he tensed and gently peered around the doorframe, into the small docking berth beyond.

The platform just on the other side of the door was empty. However, the gangway a few meters beyond it, stretching to the open door of the shuttle, was not. A body lay prone by the hatch to the small craft, face down on the metal grating. It didn't look like any person Falco could recognize, which was a good sign. It meant someone friendly was still on the shuttle.

Just then, the barrel of a pistol could be seen sneaking around the hatchway of the team's shuttle, poking out from inside. Falco winced. The body could also be a trap. A trap that was about to be sprung.

"Hey!" Falco called out, remaining hidden behind the hallway doorway. There was no use in being quiet anymore; if they were waiting for him, they knew he was there already. "Rhena, that you?"

There was no immediate reply. Falco tightened his grip on his revolver.

After a small delay though, a familiar voice spoke up from within the shuttle.

"Yeah Falco, it's us." It was Bill. He sounded tired.

The pair in the hallway breathed a sigh of relief. Falco holstered his weapon, and they emerged from cover and began crossing the short boarding gantry to the shuttle. Along the way, they heard an exasperated sigh come from within the craft.

"Dammit Grey," the second, female voice said, "If you would've waited a minute I could've shot him."

* * *

"Goin' on break, Rish!"

A deep grunt of acknowledgment from the back of the shop answered Katt's call as she led the pair of mercenaries from Rishad's Repairables. They stepped back into the salvage district's concourse and paused for a moment, gaining their bearings. The district had settled a little since Fox and Miyu entered the store about a half hour ago, though there was still a good amount of foot traffic.

Some junk vendors were taking advantage of the lessened crowds, and had begun to shift some of their stock around with heavy lifting machinery. The sounds of industrial lifts resounded above the hum of conversation, and the trio assembled outside Rishad's had to project to be heard.

"You sure you don't mind walking us back?" Fox asked Katt. He adjusted the carrying belts of a bulky, rectangular hunk of technology strapped to his back. It weighed quite a bit more than the backpack he had given to Miyu to carry, but it was still manageable. And based on the price tag he saw below the device on the shelf back in the store, Slippy would be quite appreciative of the physical exertion.

"Not at all; that's why I offered!" Katt replied with a giggle, shrugging playfully. She had wiped her face and hands with an oil rag before leaving, but otherwise she was unchanged from before, jumpsuit and all.

"Fair enough," Fox laughed, starting off on the long trek back to the public docking bays. If all was going according to plan, the rest of the team would meet them back there soon after they arrived. He wanted to make sure there was enough of a buffer zone for Katt to leave before Falco and Bill returned with their assigned wares.

They didn't say anything as they walked through the maze of vendors and junk, taking the most direct route to the district exit. Anything they would've said would have been drowned out by the machinery, anyway. But the lack of conversation along the way gave Fox a chance to think about the situation his team found itself in.

And at the core of it all was Peppy.

As de facto leader of the Star Fox mercenary squad, Fox had to juggle any number of responsibilities and duties, from seeking out contracts to keep his friends fed to playing the bad guy and enforcing restrictions on supplies. It had been stressful enough with a team of four, back before his life had been turned upside down by the bounty on his head. And back then he could count on the help of ROB and Peppy for support, too.

Now, with ROB in unfixable pieces, and Peppy kidnapped to whereabouts unknown, Fox found himself in charge of a team of seven, all on the run from the most powerful military in the Lylat System. Bounty hunters were always nipping at his heels, and it was often questionable whether or not he would be able to keep the _Great Fox_ going for another day. And despite all that, he still had to find a way to operate his mercenary business in an increasingly hostile market. Every job they took, Fox had to carefully consider whether or not the people offering the contract in the first place would be willing to turn on him and hand his team in for the bounty. It had already happened a couple times, though luckily he had planned for it and stayed one step ahead.

But the vulpine had a sneaking suspicion that his intuition in those situations would only hold out so long. Sooner or later, he'd place his trust where he shouldn't, and he'd wind up in Cornerian stockades, facing down a life sentence for treason. Or worse. More importantly, his friends would probably face similar fates. If his own demise didn't trouble Fox, that of his teammates most certainly did.

Fox dropped behind Miyu and Katt as they left the salvage district through a connecting hallway. He listened idly as Katt struck up a conversation with the lynx, asking how she had wound up with the mercenaries in the first place.

Fox watched as Miyu stammered for a moment, unsure of what to say, before filling Katt in on a bogus story she made up on the spot. He didn't stop her.

The vulpine returned to his mental meanderings, though with a new topic.

Miyu.

He couldn't believe how rapidly the tension between the two had disappeared, at least on a casual level. They had been laughing and making jokes nearly their entire shopping spree on Shoana, though Miyu had shed none of her characteristic lack of tact. They weren't exactly best friends, but they weren't sworn enemies either, as they had apparently been a month before. Fox was still fuzzy on that part. He had yet to unravel exactly _why_ she had taken such a vendetta against him so early on, but he tried not to think about it. She seemed genuine enough now.

But despite all that, Fox couldn't help but have reservations. Falco shared an almost uncanny resemblance to Miyu as far as having a loose tongue went, but his colorful accusations towards her weren't without merit. Fox never did figure out how the Black Star smugglers had ambushed his crew so quickly after Miyu joined up with them back on Corneria.

Fox peered out of his internal monologue for a moment and saw that the three of them found themselves in smallish, domed room. The hub of Shoana's docking bay.

As they made their way to the elevator, Fox noticed a pair of hares loitering around the lift station. Their dress was what caught his eye; their stark white clothing stood out against the drab coloring of the walls. Both of them, a male and a female, looked almost identical, in fact. As his eyes lingered, he noticed that this extended to even their ears; each had one of a natural fur color, and the other of bright red. They were huddled close together and apparently in the middle of a private conversation when the trio stopped next to them, waiting for the lift.

All it took was for their conversation to stop and one of them to cast a brief, knowing glance in their direction to make Fox start to feel uneasy. He knew the feeling well by now. There was something off about the couple, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what.

The lift doors open and the three stepped inside. The girls hadn't stopped their conversation. With Fox now facing out of the elevator, he could watch the pair of hares as the doors closed. He didn't stop watching as he jabbed the proper floor button on the panel next to the doors. They never glanced towards him again.

As the elevator began to ascend, Fox made a show of stretching his arms and adjusting the position of the device on his back. As he did so, he let his elbow brush up against the door panel, activating a couple more buttons.

"Smooth one Tiger," Katt quipped, noticing the 'accident'.

Fox smiled sheepishly and shrugged his shoulders.

Katt laughed and allowed Miyu to finish telling her, by this time, quite epic story. Fox figured he shouldn't explain his hunch anyway. All that mattered was that when the hares watched which floor Fox and the girls stopped at, they'd have three to search instead of one.

* * *

"About time you showed up Fox; we were getting worried."

Falco approached the vulpine as he stepped through the doorway into the Star Fox team's private docking berth. He crossed his arms and stepped down the gangway from the shuttle, eyeing the device on his friend's back. He also noticed that his friend bore a surprised and anxious expression. He raised an eyebrow.

"You find-" he began, but stopped when a chatting Miyu and Katt entered from the hallway.

Falco and Katt both stopped in mid-stride and mid-sentence, Katt at the entrance to the docking bay and the avian still on the gangway.

For a moment, everything in the station seemed to come to a very sudden, very silent halt.

Then Katt's raucous gales of laughter broke the spell.

Nearly doubled over in mirth, the feline had to brace herself on the railing of the platform she stood on as her legs almost gave out. She tried to keep looking at the orange-dyed avian, but couldn't keep her eyes on him for the tears of glee that flooded them.

"No…no way!" she stammered, pointing directly at Falco, "There's no freaking way you got him to-"

"Get her the hell out of here!" Falco yelled at Fox, briefly drowning her out before turning and disappearing into the shuttle again.

"Falco, I-" Fox began, trying to explain.

Katt couldn't stop. "I-I can't, I can't, I-oh _god_," she cried, bursting into another round of near hysterics.

A grey vulpine Fox didn't recognize stepped out of the shuttle and down the gangway as Falco rushed past him. He turned back briefly, wondering what was happening before continuing down to the platform and finding the source of the laughter. He stopped in front of the three assembled there, eying Katt for a moment before turning to Fox.

"I'm gonna take a shot in the dark and say that you're Fox McCloud," the grey fox said, offering a hand to the mercenary. "Jason Mierse."

"Yeah…" Fox replied, narrowing his eyes and taking the offered paw in a firm shake. "Do I know you?"

"You don't," Jason answered, crossing his arms again and smiling. "But we've got a mutual friend in Billy Grey. Just thought I'd introduce myself. Him and your buddy Falco stopped by my humble shop to pick up some munitions and we took some time to…er, catch up."

"Ah," Fox nodded, cocking his eyebrow. That explained who this silver-furred fox was, but not why he was in their docking bay.

Jason continued, as if reading his mind. "I'm here because while catching up, ol' Billy got…distraught. I know you've got places to go and people to see, so I won't bore you with the details, but I'm sure Falco can fill you in. Just wanted to give you the heads up."

"Thanks…I guess," Fox replied, still a little confused.

"Sure thing mate."

For a moment they were quiet, the only sound in the docking bay the desperate sobs of Katt Monroe trying to regain her breath.

"Fox let's go!" Falco cried from inside the shuttle.

"Looks like you're needed," Jason smiled, "I appreciate the business my friend. Take care of Billy; he might need some looking after for a bit."

Fox smirked and walked around him towards the shuttle, twisting and walking backward a few steps as he continued talking to the grey fox. "Appreciate it Jason. Take care yourself. Thanks for the help Katt!"

Katt raised a hand in acknowledgement as she began to recover, wiping tears from her eyes.

Fox turned back to the shuttle as it began to hum with life. Someone was clearly eager to leave Shoana. As he made his way up the gangway, he noticed a shadowed form lying on the floor far beneath it, where the arms holding the shuttle aloft sprouted from the deck. It looked like a body.

He cocked his head to the side as he entered the shuttle. He suddenly found himself with a lot of questions to ask.

* * *

"You going to be okay there ma'am?" Jason asked as the shuttle cleared the docking bay, slipping through the magnetic field of the hanger and boosting into the asteroid field beyond. The roar of the shuttle's engines abruptly cut out as soon as it was space-borne, the lack of air silencing the thrusters.

"Yeah, yeah," Katt choked, standing up straight and regaining her composure. She took a deep breath. "Whoo boy…that was probably the funniest damn thing I've seen all year."

"Uh-huh," Jason replied, looking over the jump-suited feline. "So I take it you had some history with that Falco fella."

"Oh, you don't know the half of it," Katt said, grinning and finally appearing to settle down. "You don't know the ha-"

The sound of footsteps caught their attention at the same time, and they turned towards the docking bay door.

The footsteps belonged to a pair of hares, walking by in an animated conversation with each other. Dressed in stark white clothes, they seemed very unconcerned with their surroundings, never breaking their discussion even as they passed the open door. Their words centered around some trivial personal anecdote or another. Their cloaks were both brushed open, revealing full holsters on their hips, but other than that, there was nothing overtly interesting about them.

Except their ears. One natural, one red.

The hares continued on down the hallway, out of sight for the two left in the docking bay.

Katt stopped smiling and looked at Jason. He looked back at her.

* * *

A boxy shuttle glided through a cloud of asteroids, leaving the marked trade lane and pushing into the less traveled portions of the field. Soon the flashing beacon identifying the 'safe' route through Meteos disappeared altogether from the shuttle's radar system. Rocks started becoming larger and more erratic, appearing in greater density and number. The pilot of the shuttle was skilled enough though, and the ship continued to glide through with little difficulty.

The avian cursed at the console displays as they began to flicker and fill with static, only occasionally clearing for brief moments. The craft was entering one of the many radioactive dead zones within the asteroid belt, background radio activity rendering navigation instruments all but useless, at least on a smaller vessel like the shuttle. Without specialized equipment – _expensive _specialized equipment – the pilot was essentially flying by sight alone.

It was why the Star Fox team chose the spot to park their parent ship. Nobody ventured through a Meteos dead zone without a definite reason to do so, leaving the _Great Fox _safe from being accidently stumbled upon.

Inside the shuttle, a curious fox was leaning against the hull, struggling to understand the answers to his questions.

"Alright…there's no way I heard that right," Fox mumbled, rubbing his temples. "Start again. Bill, you have a _wife_?"

"Fiancé," Rhena corrected, standing opposite the vulpine on the other side of the small craft.

"Right, sorry," Fox acknowledged before turning back to Bill, sitting in the back of the shuttle. "A fiancé, who's gone missing…and you want to what now?"

"Find her," Bill said quietly, looking up at his friend. "I'm not sure why you're not getting this, Fox."

"I'm not getting this because it's not making any sense," Fox replied, careful to keep his voice from rising at his friend. "Glossing over the fact that she-"

"Sophia," Bill interjected.

"Right. Glossing over the fact that _Sophia _apparently didn't warrant importance enough to bother mentioning a month ago when we took you on, Jason said she's gone missing on Fortuna. A _very _populated world and one with probably the second most extensive intelligence network next to Corneria. And you're asking us to land and _look _for her? You know all this, I shouldn't have to tell you."

Bill stared at Fox. His empty expression began to reflect shadows of pain at his friend's apparent dismissal of the safety of his future bride.

Fox noticed right away.

"Look," he began, losing the edge in his voice, "I'm sorry Bill. And I'm sorry this happened; you know I am. Trust me, I'd want to be the first to find her were it under any other circumstance. But it isn't any other circumstance. The lot of us have very large bounties around our necks right now; you don't think that we'd be walking right into a trap?"

"You don't think I haven't considered that?" Bill replied, picking up the verbal edge Fox dropped. "I'm not stupid Fox, I know a thing or two about basic tactics. I know that this is exactly what they, whoever the hell _they _may be, want me to do. But that means I also know that she's still alive. A dead piece of bait does no good."

Fox looked away. He didn't have the heart to remind his friend that without any proof that she was alive, her presumed captors had already gotten Bill this far. The very idea of bait could do plenty good, much less the notion of it being dead or alive. But the idea behind his point stood. And it was becoming increasingly obvious that Bill wasn't going to relent on the subject.

"I'm not going to endanger you or anyone else with this," Bill continued, looking around the small shuttle. Save Falco, who was piloting the ship, everyone else had their eyes on him. "I'm not asking anyone to help. I'll take my fighter and go by myself once we get back."

"Grey, I'm not about to let-" Rhena began, but was cut off.

"You're not coming with me," the hound said, looking up at the wolf. "That's an order. We're not military anymore, but at least grant your old S.O. a last command."

Rhena stared at him for another moment, but she, and the rest of the shuttle, fell quiet after that. There wasn't anything anyone else wanted to say.

It was another few minutes before Fox, who had since sunk to the floor of the shuttle, spoke up again, this time to Rhena.

"So who was that stiff at the bottom of the hanger?" He felt like changing the subject.

Rhena shrugged, crossing her arms and putting a foot flat against the hull she was leaning on. "Someone who got nosy. He was sniffing around our berth and had no reason to."

"So you just shot him?" Miyu asked.

"Well he had a pistol drawn too. …Maybe I should've mentioned that."

"So a lone guy was skulking around our shuttle? That seems a little odd." Fox pondered aloud. "I very much doubt a single bounty hunter would risk poking around a ship flown by five marks."

"Not to mention it's unlikely that one person could figure out who we were and where we landed," Miyu added.

"Unless someone told him," Falco said from the pilot's seat, briefly casting a glance at the lynx. He let the words hang in the air for a moment.

"Me?" Miyu asked, narrowing her eyes back at him when he shrugged. "You mean me. Right. 'Cuz I broadcast a 'heads up' to a single person that a shuttle of _five _armed mercenaries was landing somewhere. He must've been one self-confident sonuvabitch."

"_Four _mercenaries," Falco corrected, turning back to piloting the ship. He continued speaking at the front viewport. "And a sleeper. Or maybe not. Hey, I'm just thinking aloud. Don't mind me."

"Catch anything unique about him?" Fox asked Rhena, ignoring the side conversation.

"Not really," Rhena shrugged again. "He showed up just before Falco got back with the weapons; I didn't have time to search or hide him before I heard footsteps and thought someone else was coming. Turns out it was just Falco. The body didn't have any ID on him, so I thought the simplest thing was to just push him to the hanger floor. I think he was in a gang or something though; one of his ears was all red for some reason. Looked like a tattoo."

Fox nodded, but froze when she mentioned the last bit. At the same time Falco spun around again. Their eyes met and suddenly the small space inside the shuttle became very grave.

That was when the first blast hit.

Proximity alarms blared to life too late as another shot rocked the small craft, throwing those standing to the ground. Falco struggled to regain control of the shuttle while simultaneously searching his instruments for any clue on who was attacking them. Unfortunately, the interference from the dead zone around them prevented any glimpse at the shooters. At least until they soared past from behind.

Two dual-hulled fighters glided down from above the shuttle, maneuvering in tandem as they flew a distance away from the craft. At the same time, they broke in opposite directions, curving around and coming back towards the mercenaries, laser cannons blazing. Falco could do very little to avoid the head-on charge, and the clumsy shuttle soaked up more damage than its meager shielding could take. The protection fell just as the fighters passed by.

Barely seconds had passed since the first shot, and suddenly the ship was naked in space. The shuttle's armor wouldn't hold up to a direct hit.

So when a solid _thunk _resounded through the craft, everyone flinched. The sound had originated from the ceiling; it was as though someone had chucked a rock at them.

The com system hissed. A low buzzing began playing through the ship's speakers, slowly resolving itself into a coherent voice. At the same time, a static-filled com window appeared on the shuttle's viewport, gradually clarifying into the shape of a vaguely familiar face.

"H…llo there," the face said.

"They bugged us," Falco reported to the group, releasing the controls and drifting in a straight line. His hands fell on top his head in frustration. A single well placed shot would rupture the shuttle's hull. And there was no possible way the sluggish utility craft could outrun the pair of fighters pursuing it. There was no point in further maneuvers.

"Bugged?" Rhena asked, pushing herself to her feet, rubbing her forehead. Her dark fur hid a fresh welt from the deck she had slammed into.

"It's a com device," Fox explained, also finding his way to his feet. "It attaches itself to the ship and allows for clear communication from the launcher to the target. In this case, it cuts out all the static from the dead zone."

"That's correct," the face said, finally resolving to the point where Fox could see where he recognized it from.

A hare was smiling back at the crew, the collar of whom could just be made out in the headshot in the come window. It was white. And a single red ear poked through the pilot's flight helmet.

"Who are you?" Fox asked, standing behind Falco in the pilot's chair.

"My name is Josiah, and you are going to follow my directions very carefully," the hare replied, "You may consider yourselves prisoners of a Blood Tip mercenary."

Falco glanced back at Fox with a grim expression. They both recognized the group's name.

"Alright Josiah," Falco said, offering a stall. "What do you want?"

As Josiah and Falco spoke, Miyu came up behind Fox, lowering her voice to a whisper.

"What's a Blood Tip?" she asked.

"They're a mercenary group we fought during the Lylat War," Fox whispered back, turning his head towards Miyu but keeping his eyes on Josiah's viewport com frame. "They were hired by Andross' generals to assault a Cornerian base on Fortuna we were sent to protect. When they couldn't finish the job, Andross had to send in Star Wolf."

"Star Wolf?" Miyu almost exclaimed in disbelief. She was well aware of the infamous squad captained by current Warlord O'Donnell. "You fought Star Wolf?"

Fox nodded. "We've had a few random run-ins with Blood Tip goons since then; I think their leadership's holding a grudge for not only defeating them, but humiliating them by forcing Andross to call in Wolf and his boys."

"You guys have a habit of making an impression, huh?"

"I guess so," Fox replied, finally looking directly at her. "You're standing here, eh?"

Despite the situation, Miyu smirked.

Josiah's perturbed voice caught Fox's attention.

"I get the feeling you don't realize the gravity of your situation, bird," he said, tired of arguing with Falco. "You _cannot_ barter your way out of this. Now, slave your navigation through the bug to the following frequency."

A double laser burst seared by the viewport from behind, incinerating a small asteroid and pelting the unshielded shuttle with debris.

"Alright! Sheesh," Falco yelled, giving the proper navigational instructions to the computer at his fingertips.

As soon as the command was given, he let go of the control column and it began moving on its own. Surprisingly though, the overall direction of the shuttle's flight path didn't seem to be changing much. In fact, it didn't shift at all. There were still flying the in the same direction.

Falco raised an eyebrow when he saw this. Pausing a moment, he tried to get his words to sound as non-confrontational as possible. It was no small feat. "So where are we going then?"

"Where else, Mr. Lombardi?" the hare responded. "The _Great Fox_."

Before anyone could stop him, Falco laughed. "Oh, okay. Right. Do you really think the two of you can keep a crew of seven in check?"

"Probably not," Josiah said, his face twisted into a grin. "But the strike team we dispatched to your ship an hour ago should have no problem. Enjoy the ride." And with that, he cut the com transmission, leaving the shuttle once again separated from the outside world.

A beat passed.

"Well shit," Falco quipped, summing up the entire shuttle's collected feelings at the moment. He spun the pilot's chair around and faced the crew. "Now what do we do?"

"Nothing," Rhena commented.

"Won't be able to get a signal out," Fox mused out loud, "And if we try to run, they'll gun us down without breaking a sweat."

"Like I said, we do nothing."

"We can't just do nothing, Rhena."

"Well we can't do just about _anything_ either, Miyu. Even if we do somehow manage to break free, _and _evade pursuit, _and _somehow convince them _not _to follow us to the _Great Fox_…if what Josiah said is right, then the ship's under lockdown by their buddies. _Then _what?"

While the wolf was only talking to Miyu, everyone else took the words and fell silent. Nobody could answer her.

And then, someone did.

One of the hostile fighters abruptly soared into view from above the shuttle, just like during the initial attack. However, unlike the initial attack, there was something very off about the fighter's motions.

It was spinning. On its side.

A large asteroid was looming ahead of the shuttle. The slaved autopilot of their shuttle had already begun to alter its course to compensate, but not before the Star Fox team lost sight of the fatally tumbling fighter in a brief, violent explosion against the solid rock.

Directly following the hapless fighter's detonation, a second craft tore by the shuttle's viewport, sporting a much different outline than the previous.

Angled like an arrow, the pink trimmed ship sported two sets of wings: a single appendage on each side, and a pair of dorsal stabilizers. Its engines glowed furiously, far brighter than typical thrusters of such a size, apparently just cooling down from an extended boost. Though clearly originally designed as a fighter, the new intruder appeared to have been modified for cargo duty. Modular extensions sprouted from the main hull, increasing its outline by a bit but still allowing the ship to maintain its original heritage lines.

The fighter-turned-freighter rolled on its side and pulled away from the asteroid from which a debris cloud was rapidly expanding. It had just barely begun turning when it came under fire from the second enemy craft. Pale blond bursts of energy pulsed through the void between asteroids towards the newcomer, occasionally striking home but more often than not missing their mark. The pink ship led the surviving Blood Tip craft out of view of the Star Fox team, as their shuttle continued on.

Falco stared slack jawed at the sequence of events that had just been carried out before his eyes. A moment passed before he realized what he could do.

Overriding the voluntary slave controls, he regained command over the shuttle's movements, and immediately funneled all of its available energy into its engines. The shuttle shook with power and its thrusters belched to life, pushing the team faster along its original trajectory.

"Hold on, we're making a run for it," Falco offered, not waiting to make sure everyone was secure before making the sluggish shuttle dance.

He had a sneaking suspicion he knew who the interloper's ship belonged to, but the avian felt it wasn't important enough to comment on at the moment. Getting as far away from the surviving Blood Tip mercenary as possible was.

Unfortunately, his crew didn't necessarily feel the same way.

"That was Katt," Fox said distantly, grasping what he could to stand upright in the jostling ship.

"Katt? As in Katt _Monroe_?" Bill asked incredulously, recognizing the name from Falco's history. He barely registered the perturbed noise the avian made at the mention of her name. "But that looked like an Invader-class ship from the Lylat War. One of Andross'."

"Yeah, like I said," Fox replied, looking briefly at the hound. "Katt. She jacked one during the liberation of Zoness."

"Didn't she say she doesn't use weapons anymore?" Miyu mentioned, glancing at Fox. "Back at the junk shop? She didn't even load that gun."

Everyone save Falco looked at her for moment in equal parts confusion and amazement.

"How's she going to…" Rhena began to wonder aloud, but was unable to finish.

"Well, we're not waiting around to find out," Falco added, jerking the control stick to maneuver around an erratically spinning rock. He glanced back at Fox for a moment.

The vulpine nodded as an unspoken word passed between them, and moved towards the duffel bag Falco had brought back from Shoana. He bent down and unzipped it, pausing for a moment to steady himself with a hand on the deck when the shuttle's compensators briefly failed.

"Where are we going?" Miyu asked.

Fox pulled a freshly purchased assault rifle from the bag, and returned the lynx's gaze. "The _Great Fox_. We weren't that far."

"But he said there's already a strike team onboard. Slippy and Linka are probably captured by now."

"Right," Fox agreed, fishing a clip of ammunition out of the bag. "Let's go fix that."

* * *

Alrighty then, on to the reviews.

**chaos Leader: **Yeah, I've noticed a definite trend in my reviews about getting the pacing of a scene right. All I can say is that I'll keep trying. And I hope I didn't give the impression that I discount romance entirely; just as a main plot point. There has to be something else driving the story, or like I said, I feel it's going to be forced into only a handful of end scenarios. You have some very good insight there cL; thanks again for the review.**  
**

**AndrossKenobi: **Well, a comparison to LOTR is quite the compliment in my book; are you sure you really want to commit to that? :) Don't worry, the cast (and consequently the readers) will find out about the full range of their predicament soon. But that's all I'm going to say about that. Thanks for the review!**  
**

**RedBay: **As usual, your review is much too long to give a proper reply to, but trust me, also as usual I've read and analyzed every bit of it. There are very few bits where I don't agree with you, or at least concede a valid point, save the one about Linka and her sudden change of attitude. Perhaps I should have elaborated more, but a lot can change in a span of a month (time since the Gamma pilots became Star Fox for all intents and purposes). Those lines regarding how the three former Cornerians interact with each other were meant as a sort of explanation as to what their attitudes regarding each other had become in the intervening weeks since they became mercenaries. Rhena's softened towards near everyone but Falco, and Bill's still (subconsciously) feeling responsible for Linka and Rhena's presence in their current situation.

I'm planning a good deal of backstory diving in the coming chapters, so maybe I'll be able to lay things out a little less cryptically then. Thanks for the review RedBay; couldn't ask for a better editor.

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	25. Chapter 25: Fork

**XXV: **Fork**  
**

_"This is becoming tiresome."_

_"Well you couldn't have expected this whole thing to go off without a hitch."_

_"No, I did not expect that, but this...where are all of these leaks even coming from? I've done everything I can to make this air tight on my end, and now it seems like every time we seal off a crack, another pipe bursts open."_

_"Admiral Gage, Sir?"_

_"Don't pretend to have forgotten, Bishop; the whole deal with Rashik back in Sector Z. We had to sacrifice a cruiser and a frigate just to shut off that little valve. Do you realize how difficult it was to quietly transfer all the men on his list to those ships? Not to mention losing Hartford; that boy was a promising captain. And now this? This? Tell me Commander, why am I holding this piece of paper in my hands? Do I appear to be his errand boy? I am a Cornerian Admiral for Sol's sake..."  
_

_"..."_

_"I apologize...this is not your fault Commander. But if I was not convinced that this entire thing had to be done, I'm not sure I would even offer that man the time of day. He has no respect for the insignia of rank, or the capabilities of my men with these petty tasks he heaps on us. But...things could not continue the way they have been."_

_"I understand, sir. And if it means anything, I get the same vibe. But things being as they are, I'm afraid I need a response for his lieutenant."_

_"And now he's using one of my commanders as a messenger. Excellent. ...All right, tell him the strike will be carried out as he suggests. Lylat could do without one more mercenary-turned-warlord anyway. But tell him to contact me directly with these matters from now on. I won't have my top officers being put on courier duty."_

_"Sir."  
_

_

* * *

_

"Oh I don't like this at all," Falco Lombardi said as he set the shuttle down in the _Great Fox_'s rear landing bay. As soon as he felt the deck under the land gear, he quickly shut down the craft, disabling the cabin lights and replacing them with their dim emergency counterparts.

It was a tight fit in the small hanger, already occupied as it was by another shuttle. The second shuttle looked far more dangerous than the vessel currently carrying a good portion of the Star Fox crew. It was angled in the front, with the appearance of having a strong underbite, as well as sporting a stubby wing on either side of the hull. It was outlined with a faint halo of light, indicating a source of illumination on the other side of the ship, towards the hallway connecting the hanger with the rest of the _Great Fox_.

But otherwise, both ships sat quiet in the darkened bay.

"The door was open, the lights are out," Falco began again, spinning the chair around and facing the armed or arming passengers onboard of the newly arrived shuttle. "Smell like a trap to anyone else?"

"Reeks of it, birdie," Rhena Haggerty replied, checking the sight of a sub machine gun. She cast him a skeptical look. "But we don't have much of a choice, do we?"

"You couldn't have picked up some armor while you were at your friend's place?" Miyu asked Bill, poking through the half empty duffel bag the team had just retrieved their heavy arms from. "If they're waiting for us, we could be filled full of holes before we get two steps into the hanger."

"Didn't think to ask, to be honest," the hound replied, an image of his fiancé in danger briefly dancing before his eyes before he shook it clear of his mind. He had to stay in the moment, though it was much easier said than done.

"Alright, listen up," Fox said as the other four gathered around him. The low light of the cabin made it difficult to discern more than outlines, but it was enough to go by. "We don't know what we're getting into exactly, and I really, _really_ hate going into things blind, but Rhena's right. We don't have much of a choice here. We have to assume that Link and Slip are captured, at best, so shoot anything that moves."

The outlines nodded in the low light of the shuttle's cabin.

"As soon as we clear the _Great Fox_, a couple of us will go help Katt. It's only been a few minutes; she could still be alive, and in a heap of trouble. She saved us. We owe her that much." Without waiting for his words to sink in, Fox nodded and hefted his rifle. "Okay. Let's go."

He flipped the 'open' tab on the shuttle door and activated the gangway, ducking back behind the hull as he did so. Instinctively the rest of the crew followed suit, Falco and Miyu on his side of the door, Bill and Rhena on the opposite. As an afterthought, he killed the dim cabin lights altogether, plunging them into a more perfect darkness.

A loud, labored hiss filled the silence as the threshold opened itself, sliding into the very hull the team was hiding behind. The gangway extended on rusty gears and ancient struts, whining with every meter it extended towards the deck of the _Great Fox_. When it finally touched down, it scraped along the metal for a bit before shrieking to a halt at about the same time the door disappeared completely into the wall.

"_So much for the element of surprise."_

Fox waited for the noise in the hanger to settle. Seconds ticked by like minutes as his ears strained for any possible indication of an enemy presence. When he could hear nothing but the breathing of his teammates around him, he twisted and leapt silently from the shuttle, shunning the gangway altogether. His eyes weren't particularly gifted towards night vision, but on the way to the deck, his quick mind didn't register any presence that he could see. His boots touched down with the faintest of footfalls, and he let his vertical momentum push him into a crouch.

He stayed down for several moments.

Nothing.

When the team heard no gunfire erupt or ambush sprung, they made their way off the craft via the gangway or jumping down, careful to minimize their noise as much as possible. As each hit the deck, they jogged towards Fox, who was carefully picking his way around the foreign shuttle. The vulpine's head was moving rapidly, twisting his sight between where he headed, and every exterior nook and cranny of the alien craft.

When they reached the front of the second shuttle, they stopped.

The source of light Falco noticed while landing turned out to be a flashlight on the ground, right on the hanger threshold. The door was open, and beyond it laid a dark, foreboding hallway. While any number of shapes and shadows occupied the space beyond, what occupied the foreground immediately stole the team's attention.

Four bodies, all lying about in different poses and positions, were spread out over a few meters, centered around the doorway. Faces were impossible to distinguish in the faint, eerie light of the discarded flashlight, but upon closer inspection, the team had little trouble discerning most everything else.

Falco and Rhena gingerly stepped around the bodies, weapons trained forward and scanning for any sign of movement from further down the corridor. Soon they disappeared into the hallway itself, leaving the other three by the foreign shuttle for a few brief moments. The sound of delicate movements and hushed whispers preempted Falco poking his head back into the light of the flashlight, giving the 'all-clear'.

While Rhena kept a watchful eye and a weapon's barrel out for trouble, Fox and his team began tying pieces together.

A tiny gleam caught Miyu's eye, and she bent down over the closest of the bodies, snatching a spare flashlight from the corpse's belt. After fiddling with the object looking for a switch, she thumbed the tab and a second beam of light burst forth. Sweeping over the body she had just looted, her breath stopped.

The puma was riddled with bullet holes. Blood stains spotted his fatigues around every bullet wound, each of which looked almost identical to each other. Two thoughts immediately jumped to Miyu's mind. The bullets were from the same gun. And they had all impacted the corpse at the same time.

Miyu caught Fox's attention and wiped her flashlight's beam over the corpse again.

"What the…" the vulpine whispered, trailing off. He stared at the body and couldn't stop the words from slipping past his lips. "Someone was a _horrible_ shot."

"Maybe Slippy's alive after all then," Falco offered, picking his way over to the pair, gripping his weapon tightly. Though offered as a quip, Falco's words carried some hope with them.

A third flashlight sprang to life off to the side of the doorway. Glancing over, Fox saw Bill gazing down at another body.

The hound nudged the lifeless carcass with his boot. When it fell back to its original position, he applied more pressure, slowly and deliberately flipping it over on its back. When the body finally complied with a loud russle and clatter, Bill swore under his breath. He swept the body again with his flashlight.

"Same deal," he said in a hushed voice, "Someone must've put a whole clip into this gal."

"Guys," A whisper called urgently from the hallway, catching the attention of all four.

Without hesitating, they moved as quickly as they could to the doorway, their movement made a lot easier by the pair of flashlights they had found. Fox noticed in passing that the doors to the pair of small side rooms, just beyond the doorway to the hallway, were open. For a moment, the idea that they would make an excellent point for an ambush seized his mind, and his hands involuntarily tightened around his weapon. A brief sweep with his flashlight silenced his concerns though.

"_Besides, if they were hiding, they'd have already sprung their trap by now."_

When they reached her, Rhena was standing over a mound of bodies, staring down at them with a solemn expression. Her gaze never broke as they all came to a stop around her.

Their flashlights revealed what appeared to just be another dead intruder, face down over another corpse. The body's clothes, almost identical to the fatigues of the other would-be raiders, gave him away. A pistol lay just out of grasp of a lifeless hand, spun about as though it had clattered to the ground from higher up.

"Hey, 'nother one over here," Falco mentioned, kicking a previously hidden body behind them, slumped against the corner of the doorframe and the hallway bulkhead.

Fox turned his attention away from the pile towards Falco's find, bending down and examining it. "Yep, full of holes," he said quietly, lifting the masked head. It lolled back down again when he let go. He turned back towards the group. "That's five bodies now. Seriously, _who _could've done this?"

"She did."

In an instant, all five of them spun towards one of the open side rooms. The beams of light from the flashlights they had found converged, revealing the source of the words that none of them uttered.

"She did it," Slippy Toad repeated, his eyes locked a ghostly trance. His face was beginning to show signs of an ashen hue, and voice trembled as though in awe. He lifted a shaking arm and pointed behind them. "She did them all."

Fox's mouth moved to ask him questions, but he found himself unable to speak. Instead, he followed the toad's eyes with his own.

Rhena's got there first.

The pile. Beneath the raider. Another body. A slender wrist. A golden tail.

"Linka!" Rhena shouted, abandoning all sense of tactical awareness as she dropped her weapon and grabbed the top body, hurling it away with a grunt. Her breathing suddenly became erratic; her movements full of emotion. Her face contorted into some mix of excitement and fear. And then, just as soon as the flurry of motion began, it stopped.

Beneath the body, Linka Pyrokanzia lay on her back, a beacon of familiarity in a sea of inky darkness and black fatigues. A small pool of crimson fluid had gathered beneath one of her legs, surface tension shining in the pale illumination of the flashlights. Her old, cut up jumpsuit was disheveled by sweat and exertion, spattered as though by a paint brush with flecks of blood, not all of it hers. The young coyote's eyes were closed and her body was relaxed, and her face looked just off from serene, as though she were experiencing a vaguely unsettling dream.

Rhena sunk to her knees. Just above Linka's right eye, a neat little hole punctured her golden fur. It was hard to discern with all of the blood scattered around, but it was real. It was_ real_.

"I-I thought I got him before…" Slippy piped up, gesturing towards the corpse that had previously been atop the coyote. Fox scanned the raider's body with his flashlight and spotted the telltale dark wetness around a hole in his temple. "Before…"

Rhena fell to the deck and slid behind Linka and gently lifted her head, cradling it in her lap. The coyote's right ear was now visible, or what was left of it. A second bullet hole emerged at the base of her ear, beneath the shredded flap of skin and tissue.

Bill couldn't stop staring at the wounds, trying to wrap his head around the trajectory the bullet must have taken. He only had limited experience with medical diagnostics, but enough to give him an estimated guess. It was as though the slug had punctured her skin above the eye, and then taken a right-angle turn upward to exit beneath her ear.

Linka's head lolled to the side, and her muzzle fell against the cloth over Rhena's leg, near one of the many unmended tears in the fabric. The wolf felt something warm. Linka's breath was warm.

Her breath.

"She's alive!" Rhena exclaimed, eyes wide. The wolf gently laid the back of her hand against the coyote's mouth to make sure. It was no more than a tiny puff of air, but it was there. It was real. "Goddammit, she's alive!"

* * *

"Goddammit, we're dead!"

An asteroid exploded meters from the windshield, rocking the fighter-turned-freighter and peppering its failing shields with debris.

Katt made her ship twist and soar, doing her best to throw off its pursuer, but she was running out of room to dance. The asteroid field was beginning to thin out, and she was rapidly losing opportunities to break line of sight. Pretty soon she'd be caught in the open.

The thinning asteroid field produced another side-effect, though she could've done without it. They had left the dead zone behind, clearing communications.

"Why are…helping these ma…" Josiah growled, his moving portrait flickering on her viewscreen. There was anger in his features. "Are…trying to take…bounty yourself? Is th…it?"

"Shut up! Shut up!" Katt snarled back in frustration. She threw her ship into another loop, hearing a yelp from behind as her passenger was once again sent flying into a bulkhead.

"Gah!" Jason moaned from the floor, holding the back of his head. He resolved this time to stay on the deck as Katt's nonstop maneuvers continued. It seemed safer. "I didn't realize dogfighting was a contact sport."

"_Life_'s a contact sport honey," Katt shouted back, gritting her teeth, "Not my fault you forgot your helmet."

* * *

"Where are you Katt…," Fox murmured to himself, sharp eyes caught between checking the instruments of his Arwing and scanning the asteroid field outside his cockpit.

The vulpine found himself gazing out at the rocks more often though, thanks to the dead zone. The readouts of his sensor equipment were shaky at best, barely even picking up his wingmate not more than a few ship-lengths away. He and Miyu had planned out their rescue flight before launching from the _Great Fox_, but even so, it was endlessly annoying that he couldn't speak with her. Maybe he _should_ have waited for Slippy to reapply that com bug…

The pair of fighters continued along the most likely escape route Katt would have taken. It took them further and further from the _Great Fox_, and consequently, the dead zone.

Fox was getting nervous. Asteroids were starting to get smaller. And according to one of the few constant radar hits he was receiving, they were getting closer to a nearby trade lane.

"…hear…ox?"

Fox couldn't make out a word she said, but it wasn't hard to tell that the voice belonged to Miyu. Their comms were returning.

"Loud and not so clear, Miyu," he replied into his wiry headset, knowing full well she probably couldn't hear him too clearly either. "Give it a second and it'll clear up."

"…otcha."

Faster than her voice though, Fox's instruments suddenly sprang to life. His radar detected a pair of ships nearby and threw them up on the HUD, tiny brackets highlighting their expected positions in flashing grey. They were unknowns engaged in combat.

Glancing over, he made eye contact with Miyu on his wing and waved his hand. Without waiting for him to start moving, she immediately banked towards him. Her instruments must've picked them up too.

Fox yawed the nose of his fighter towards the pair of dancing targets and engaged his boosters.

His Arwing ducked and weaved nimbly through the smaller asteroids. Miyu's fighter screamed after his, catching on to his wake and following his lead.

Tiny flashes and explosions began filling the bracket boxes as they neared, visual evidence of a one-sided battle. Then Fox's targeting computer made a match.

It was Katt.

"She's alive," he reported to Miyu, "Let's do this quickly."

"Roger," Miyu replied, her voice serious but her inflection hopeful.

They cleared a larger rock and suddenly Fox's targeting projectors audibly hummed to life. The digital lines and crosshairs filling his HUD shifted with purpose, sharpening with what could only be described as anger. Fox's practiced eyes easily scanned and analyzed the bits of information tossed at him. Lining crosshairs up on the aggressing fighter, the grey brackets flashed red.

Fox pulled the trigger.

Twin streams of searing energy leapt forth from both Arwings, zeroing in on the Blood Tip's engines and bringing its shields down before the pilot knew what hit him. Against the Arwings with the element of surprise, there was no hope. The doomed ship tried to break, and Fox thought he heard the pilot begin to transmit a message to him, but he didn't wait. His cannons kept firing.

The rear thrusters of the ship flared as the laser bolts slagged the thin armor and punctured the hull, burning brightly before an explosion tore the fighter apart from within.

Fox swooped through the expanding debris field, and latched on to Katt's trajectory. As he pulled even, her portrait zipped open on his HUD.

"Oh Fox," she said, laughing with relief. "My _hero_." She fluttered her eyelashes coyly before returning to a normal posture. "Also my thanks. Certainly took you long enough though."

"Hey, least we could do," Fox smiled, ignoring the light jab. He opened his mouth to continue, but spotted a grey fox struggling to his feet in the background of Katt's portrait. His head cocked to the side in curiousity.

"Urg," the fox mumbled, leveraging the back of the pink cat's chair to stand upright. He placed a palm on his forehead. Even through the com window, Fox could tell he wasn't doing too well; it looked as though the passenger had been in a fist fight. "Remind _me_ to remind _you_ next time that I get flight sick."

Fox heard Miyu chuckle, her picture briefly appearing and soon after disappearing above Katt's on Fox's HUD.

"How's that old pile holding up?" Fox asked, making a mental note to talk to Miyu about adjusting her com's sensitivity settings.

"She's certainly seen better days," Katt admitted, "A whole bunch of systems burned out and I'm not too sure about the engines. Inertial dampeners are on the fritz."

"Tackling a multi-ton space fighter will do that. It was a hell of a maneuver you pulled back there; I can't say I've seen too many kills chalked up via ramming."

In the solitude of her cockpit, Miyu winced.

"It was stupid is what it was," Katt replied, giving Fox a look. "With all the cargo modifications I made, there was no way I should've hoped to get away. And without weapons…well, this ship lost her fangs a long time ago."

"What were you doing trying to save us with an unarmed ship anyway?" Miyu wondered.

Katt sighed and rolled her eyes, visually agreeing with the validity of Miyu's inquiry. "That's a legitmate question, hon. Right after you guys left, Jason and I spotted those mercs with the red ears walking by your docking berth," she explained, "I thought it was a little too suspicious to leave to chance. When Jason told me he recognized them too, I knew chance had nothing to do with it."

Fox nodded, glad he wasn't the only one to pick up on the oddness of seeing the mercenaries on Shoana. "Well I appreciate it," he said genuinely. "You saved our hides back there."

Miyu nodded, making a noise of agreement.

A mild alarm sounded through the mechanic's shuttle as some system or another gave off a warning. "Don't mention it," Katt replied as her head snapped to look at something off camera, tapping a few keys on her dashboard and silencing the device. She hesitated to drag her eyes from the system readout as she continued, "But listen, there's no way I'm going to make it back to Shoana like this."

"Your reactor block looks like it's leaking something," Miyu added, glancing out her cockpit. A thin, vapory cloud was shooting out of an external tank beside the freighter's thrusters.

"Right. Well I guess that does it then. Hey hero," Katt went on with a smirk, "How about offering a girl an escort someplace safe?"

"Sure thing," Fox grinned, catching on to the running joke, "My gut's telling me this is no place for a lady. Lock on to my flight path and we'll get back to the _Great Fox_. Allow me to offer you an arm, madam."

The three laughed as their ships arced around, heading back into the asteroid field the way they came. The pair of Arwings took up flanking positions on either side of the damaged craft, lowering their speeds to match. "Much obliged, Tiger."

"Oh, so what, I don't count as a lady?" Miyu asked sarcastically.

"Didn't you read your fables as a kid? You've still got your fangs there hon," Katt replied with mirth, verbally pointing at the armed Arwing the lynx was piloting, "You're not exactly a damsel in distress."

"Rawr," Miyu opened her mouth and winked over her nose, letting her front incisors show.

"Vicious," Jason piped up from over Katt's shoulder, gaining enough of his senses to pay attention to the conversation just in time to see the lynx's teeth glisten.

* * *

Bill knew it was good for a surgeon to be detached from his work. Granted, he was no learned doctor, but he had enough field experience to make his elective medical classes in Flight Academy worthwhile. And one of the first things they taught students about field surgery was to drive away as much situational adrenaline and emotion as possible. While valuable for combat, it served no purpose when performing delicate operations; just the opposite in fact, heightened emotions often caused jittery hands and a distracted mind.

But the hound couldn't help but feel like something about his reason for detachment was wrong. Even as his medical scissors sliced through skin and sinew, separating what remained of Linka's ear from her head, all he could think about was his fiancé, Sophia. He could have been cutting construction paper for all his mind cared. His hands acted mechanically. Without thought. Without emotion.

The machinery hooked up to Linka's muzzle was in such disrepair, it squealed every time air was gently forced into her lungs. But it was working. Her chest rose and fell evenly as Bill worked. She still looked peaceful.

Bill struggled to get a bead on his abstract thoughts, but he couldn't. So much had happened so quickly, that he had trouble finding anywhere to start his mental train. Fear. Anxiety. Worry. Anger. They all clumped together into a knot, simultaneously tying up his mind and weighing in his stomach.

The doors to the room swished open, permitting Rhena entry. Bill welcomed the distraction.

Where anyone else would've cringed, Rhena just stared when she saw the scraps Linka's disembodied ear and blood soaked bandages sitting beside her. The coyote was going to be permanently disfigured even after she recovered.

"_If she recovers," _Rhena reminded herself.

"We swept the ship," The wolf reported, lingering on Linka's face for a moment before looking at Bill. "Slippy was right. All the intruders died up there in the hallway."

Bill nodded, unable to say anything else as he sutured the head-wound shut.

"And Falco said he just picked up a radar ghost from Fox and Miyu. Or at least he's pretty sure it is. We're moving out of the dead zone, but the sensors are still a little fuzzy. If it's them, it looks like they have a third ship with them. They should be back within a few minutes."

This time there was no response.

"How um…" Rhena began, trailing off. She got mad at herself. She didn't like being at a loss for words. "How is she?"

Bill kept working, showing no physical acknowledgement that she had said anything. Silence reigned for a few moments, almost prompting Rhena to repeat herself.

"I don't know," he finally said, just as the wolf opened her mouth. "I just…don't know. They don't have the equipment here to see how much damage was done to the skull when the bullet ricocheted off it. And even then, I have no idea how the blow would affect her; I never got that training. She could be brain dead for all I know."

Bill spoke with little emotion, allowing only a hint of frustration to show through. Rhena absorbed the words, but picked up on the lack of inflection right away. It didn't sound natural. Only _she _was supposed to sound so detached.

"How are _you_, sir?" she said after another moment of silence, crossing her arms.

The hound finally looked up, giving Rhena a chance to see his eyes for the first time since walking in.

They were bloodshot. And they stared past her. _Through _her.

Rhena had seen those eyes before, back while she was still a Flight Sergeant with the Cornerian Military. It seemed like a lifetime ago. But she had seen that thousand yard stare. When recruits in her squadron broke, whether from the physical training, lack of sleep, or being pushed too hard for too long in the cockpit, they all shared that same look. It was as though they could see their demise off in the distance. Once a recruit got that look about them, there was usually little anyone could do. They'd be removed from active service and rotated off base. They rarely came back.

"What was I thinking?" Bill said softly, finally breaking the silence. "How could I have thought that I could keep her safe, just _leaving _her to fend for herself?"

Rhena shook her head, trying to put as much empathy in her voice as she could. It wasn't easy. "Grey…you can't blame yourself for what happened here. Link asked to stay behind. She knew what she-"

"Not her," Bill cut her off.

Rhena's mind clicked. "Oh."

The coyote's assisted breathing ticked the seconds by as the only noise in the room. Bill turned away from the wolf, bracing himself on the counter behind him and closing his eyes.

Rhena stood still, watching her former commander.

There was no reason for her to say what she said next; no bind of rank tied them anymore. But there was a sensation inside her she couldn't recall feeling before. Seeing Linka on the ground back when they first arrived on the _Great Fox_, shot through multiple times and presumably dead, she lost something. Something holding back a strange warmness in her mind. It flowed out as water through a breeched dam.

It was this warmness that caused her to cradle the young coyote in her lap, like a mother would a child, even before she knew the girl was still alive; it forced her to react. At first she attributed it to a sense of duty, but later on, when she would look back on it, she would rule it out. The same sensation was suddenly coursing through her thoughts.

Her mouth seemed to move by itself, and her tongue and lips formed the words without input from her brain.

"We'll find her, sir," she finally said.

Bill looked up, but refused to turn back towards her.

"It doesn't matter if the others won't," she continued, taking a step forward. "In fact, they'll probably tell you not to do it. And I think they'll have some legitimate reasons as to why. But I think I know that that's not going to stop you; you're going to go looking for her."

The hound looked over his shoulder. Rhena's words were cutting through his mental fog. Still, something was holding him back. It wasn't hard to guess what.

"Don't worry, Link will be in good hands here." Rhena shrugged. "I had my reservations, but Fox turned out to be a competent leader, and a good man. I think Linka will be able to find the closest thing she can have to a home _here_, no matter what happens to us."

"Us?" Bill finally said, turning and looking the wolf in the eyes. It was no small feat, as even now, at her most emotional, the yellow orbs still burned with a strange, savage intensity.

"Sir, ah...Grey," Rhena continued, finally remembering what the hound had told her earlier about titles. She broke eye contact with him and looked down. The lupine took a breath. "…Bill. You already said you could appreciate the danger of what you're going to try to do. You know that they're waiting for you. I'd like to think that you'd have enough sense about you to not try this unless you really thought you could do it."

"Rhena, I-" he began, but stopped when she looked at him again.

"…And I think that you're going to need a wingman."

* * *

Fox knew the moment he saw the two CDF fighters soundlessly emerge from the _Great Fox_'s main hanger that he wouldn't be seeing his friend for a while.

From the seat in his Arwing, swinging around an asteroid into view of the carrier, he didn't have to look to see if he could spot Bill's helmet in the cockpit of the lead ship. Com channels were still down, but even if they were in clear and open space, he wouldn't have tried to raise the hound.

During the silent flight back, Fox had plenty of time to mull over what Bill was going to do about Sophia. The vulpine tried using reason, but realized quickly that that particular concept didn't apply to the situation. He tried putting himself in the canine's shoes, but with a hint of sadness and longing found it impossible. In the end, he relented and finally listened to what his gut had been trying to tell him ever since Bill first told him what had happened. And his gut told him that Bill would be leaving the Star Fox team for a while.

"Good luck buddy," he whispered quietly to his friend, tilting his joystick to the side. His fighter followed instructions and gently drifted, lining up with the _Great Fox_'s open docking bay doors.

"I can't wait to meet her."

* * *

Insert generic excuse about school work and whatnot here

I'm thinking of making the chapter lengths longer, so expect the word count to jump a little in the future.

**chaos Leader** and **RedBay**, I've read your reviews thoroughly and, as always, I appreciate the feedback. I apologize for not putting up individual replies, but unfortunately I've been quite busy recently. Thanks again for the critiques guys.

-Redd


	26. Chapter 26: Found

**XXVI:** _Found_

_An excerpt from the spoken journal of Fox McCloud__:_

_Jeez…where to start? I'm gonna have to go ahead and apologize to my future self here; my brain's all up in the air with everything that's been happening recently._

_[Laugh]_

_Well, the information drop on Corneria went off mostly without a hitch. The source was in position just as he said, and according to Slippy, the information on the disk he gave us checks out. That part went relatively smoothly. I would almost be worried about it if we weren't ambushed later on by some Black Star thugs. Led by a guy named Keelik, um…Richard Keelik. Go ahead and add him to the roster of headhunters and mercenaries on our collective tails. Oh, and add the Blood Tip gang too, while you're at it. They're not gonna be too happy with us any time soon._

_Let's see…Miyu's back. Caught up with us back on Corneria during the meet up. I say _caught _because apparently she was tracking us down on her own. I had my doubts…being brained by a wrench will do that…but we had a talk later on and…_

_[Sigh/Undeterminable]_

_I don't know. She played the whole 'it's lonely out here in space' bit, but damned if it didn't seem genuine. And I've got a whole backlog of these reports that say I've got a sympathetic bone in me for that whole deal. I've let her stay on for now; she seems to have lightened up a bit, too. I think I was actually making a joke with her back on Shoana. It's…a little eerie now that I think about it. I guess we'll see how it turns out._

_But that reminds me, provisions and weapons stores have been thoroughly replenished. The pantry's fuller than I can remember it being for a long time, and thanks to a surprise merchant friend of Bill's, so is our armory. We should have enough firepower to do some honest to goodness grunt work again, save the Arwings the wear and tear, and our pockets the resulting fuel cost. The guy's name is Jason…something._

_[Sigh/Undeterminable]_

_Never good with last names. Him and our second surprise guest of the week, Katt…yes, _that_ Katt…showed up to help fend off some Blood Tip goons on the way back from the station. Now her ship's got a hole in it and I've currently got one less spot in the auxiliary hanger, so they're on for the short term. At least until we can get back to Shoana to drop them off, much to Falco's relief, I'm sure._

_We ah…we pretty much lost our Cornerian contingent for the time being. Linka went down fighting a squad of Blood Tip that snuck aboard while the rest of us were running from their space-borne friends. I swear, that kid's been hiding all sorts of surprises; she took three of them by herself. She's unconscious in the med bay right now. The kid took a shot point blank to the skull. It's a hell of a stroke of luck that she's alive, but Bill's not sure how it's going to turn out. He did what he could, but he's no doctor. I mean, it's not his fault but he barely has medical training._

_He left with Rhena just as we were getting back from pulling Katt and Jason out of the fire. Turns out-_

_[Laugh]_

_Turns out he's engaged! Bill! Mister pride and patriotism's got a fiancé in need of some rescuing, according to Jason. Guess she was in hiding on Fortuna ever since we got bounties slapped on our heads. Took her saved up leave from the army so they won't come looking for her for a bit; they have no idea about her connection to Billy. But she had a lifeline set up over the net to Jason, and it went cold recently. So, Bill and his trusty sidekick She-Wolf are off to save the damsel I guess._

_[Laugh]_

_I think it might have been a bit of a misstep on his part, but there was no way I could stop him. I saw his eyes. She could be hiding in a bar called, 'Watch Out, It's a Trap' for all he would care. I guess we'll be meeting up with him later._

_[Pause/Idle]_

_There…was one other thing; I haven't mentioned to anyone yet. Falco told me her full name is Sophia Arkanian. When I heard it, it struck a bell somewhere in my head, so I went back to look and…it turns out I was right._

_A month ago, back on Yohan, when we came across…whatever the hell those were in the crates. Bodies, I guess. Well, Miyu found something. I found it later in the pockets of the pants I loaned her after we dropped her off at the Freeport. It was an ID paper of some sort; I think she took it off the open crate we found. The one with the soldier in it._

_It said the guy's name was Alai Arkanian._

_[Sigh/Undeterminable]_

_Now I'm not superstitious. And I haven't figured out religion yet. But there is something unsettling about that. The two could be unrelated, but I've got a feeling in my gut that they're not. _

_Peppy comes first. That's always been the case. As curious as Yohan was, I can do without knowing what the hell they're doing with those…boxes. Curiosity tends to lead to bad, bad places out here in the black. But if Bill ever gets back here with Sophia in tow, I'll have a question or two to ask about her brother, if that's who he turns out to be. Maybe it'll clear up why the Cornerian Military's so keen on taking us dow-_

_[Mechanical/Undeterminable]_

_Ah!_

_[Undeterminable Audio Spike Detected: Shell Trauma Suspected]_

…_oh for the love of…that's holy…_

_[Mechanical/Undeterminable]_

…_goddamned…where did it fall…_

…_Fox?_

_[Second Voice Detected…Differentiating…Assigning Tags…]_

_[Audio Spike/Undeterminable]_

_Primary: Ow! Son of a…Hey, come in._

_[Mechanical/Undeterminable]_

_Secondary: That looked painful. You busy? I can come back later-_

_Primary: Nah, nah, don't worry about it. Come in, sit down…mind the fox being eaten by the desk._

_[Footsteps]_

_[Laugh/Undeterminable]_

_Secondary: Lose something?_

_Primary: Yeah. I keep a log of…well, just stuff that happens during the day. For records and all that. It's portable and convenient and…currently hiding from me._

_Secondary: Like a journal?_

_[Laugh/Undeterminable]_

_Primary: No, no, nothing like...I mean, no. Just for record keeping and what not. I figure a lot's happened today, and it wouldn't hurt to get it all down on recorder._

_Secondary: Sounds like a journal to me._

_Primary: …Well it's not._

_Secondary: Whatever you say there, Tiger._

_Primary: Oh god; not you too._

_[Laugh/Undeterminable]_

_Secondary: Oh come on, it's adorable._

_Primary: It's degrading._

_Secondary: …It's adorably degrading. So why does she call you that anyway?_

_[Sigh/Undeterminable]_

_Primary: Beats me. First time she called me that was back on Zoness during the Lylat War. I shot a bogey off her tail, and she hasn't let up since. Didn't make any sense back then, doesn't make any sense now._

_Secondary: Huh. Maybe she's making fun of your name?_

_Primary: What? Fox? Hey, what's wrong with Fox? It's simple, it's…um, to the point. It's…_

_Secondary: Ridiculous to be called what you are. You might as well name me Girl, or Katt…um…_

_[Pause/Idle]_

_[Laugh/Undeterminable]_

_[Pause/Idle]_

_Primary: Ah, forget it; I'm never going to find it down here._

_[Undeterminable]_

_Primary: So what can I do for you? _

_Secondary: Ah, I just need someone to talk to. Seems like everyone left on board is either at each other's necks or mute for one reason or another. What's gotten into Katt and Falco anyway? I mean, it's been a couple hours since we got back and they're still tearing each other assorted new ones. …Was their whole situation really that bad?_

_Primary: It's…well it's complicated. Let's just say that. From what I remember it involved promises, breaking said promises, more promises, breaking additional promises, promises about keeping promises…you know how something like that goes. That whole deal._

_Secondary: I see._

_Primary: Yeah. I'm honestly thinking it may have been a mistake to bring her back here after all. Even for as long as it takes to get her ship refueled and working again. Slippy says the breech in her ship's reactor is going to be tricky to fix. Luckily Katt's a mechy too, so once we can tear her away from what I'm sure by now is a pile of limbs and blue feathers, maybe they'll be able to work some magic. Because I think I'd feel a lot better without that whole mess to deal with on top of everything else. I mean, where would we even shack her up?_

_Secondary: …Well…_

_[Pause/Idle]_

_Primary: Oh! Oh, right. Um…sorry. I just, with everything that's going-_

_Secondary: Don't worry about it._

_Primary: -on I just…yeah…sorry._

_Secondary: Seriously, it's fine._

_Primary: Ah…alright. Well, I'm afraid I can't offer too much in terms of, well, anything as far as barracks go. The old girl was made for four, and we never really got too many visitors before. Although now that Bill and Rhena have taken off, you might be able to…_

_[Pause/Idle]_

_Secondary: Fox?_

_[Pause/Idle]_

_Secondary: Fox, you okay?_

_Primary: Hm? Oh, hah, sorry again, I just-_

_Secondary: You sure do say sorry a lot._

_Primary: -drifted off for a second there I guess. This whole thing with…with…_

_[Pause/Idle]_

_Secondary: Bill really left, huh?_

_Primary: …Yeah…I guess it's just really dawning on me now. I mean, I had a feeling he would do this the second he explained everything to us back on the way here from Shoana, but still…it's an odd thought, you know? So fast. Just like that-_

_[Snap]_

_Primary: - and he's off, chasing a ghost, more or less. I might never see that guy again._

_Secondary: You're not blaming yourself, are you?_

_Primary: What? No. I-_

_Secondary: I just remember what you were like after they captured Peppy, and-_

_Primary: No. No, I'm disappointed he left, but I know enough to know that I had nothing to do with it. I don't have a 'woe is me' complex or anything. …Not with Bill at least._

_Secondary: Well, I've heard nothing but good things about him since I've known you guys; I'm sure he can handle himself. I heard a crazy rumor somewhere that the military tends to train people well for potentially dangerous situations. And he's got Rhena with him too. I'd hate to meet the people holding Sophie after that beast of a wolf's through with them._

_[Laugh/Undeterminable]_

_Primary: You have a point. …Man, that is a scary, scary woman._

_Secondary: Jeez, yeah. …It's strange though, about Sophia; I had a weird feeling that Rhena and Bill were…eh, nevermind._

_Primary: Heh, alright._

_[Yawn/Undeterminable]_

_Secondary: So you were saying about lodging?_

_Primary: Right. So, for the last month or so, Rhena's been using Peppy's old room and Bill took a couch in the lounge. Linka usually ended up there too._

_Secondary: Usually?_

_Primary: Well, she uh…she kinda wanders. Says it's because Bill snores, but I get the feeling she's just the restless type. Likes exploring. We've found her sleeping sometimes in her fighter, in the armory, once on the bridge…wherever's interesting I guess. _

_Secondary: Hm._

_Primary: Yeah. But anyway, with all three out of the picture in one way or another, you've got your pick._

_Secondary: I guess I'll take Peppy's room if you don't mind. …What about Katt and Jason?_

_Primary: Looks like they get the couches._

_[Laugh/Undeterminable]_

_[Low-Battery Warning: 3%]_

_Secondary: Well alright then; I better go settle in. …Alright, all finished. Not having personal possessions can be a good thing sometimes._

_[Laugh/Undeterminable]_

_Primary: Alright. Don't nod off quite yet; I'm calling a general meeting in the bridge in a bit to get this whole situation sorted out. …Again with the saluting…_

_Secondary: Sir._

_[Footsteps]_

_Primary: Damn it._

_[Mechanical/Undeterminable]_

_[Sigh/Undeterminable]_

_Primary: Now where'd I put that recorder…_

_[Undeterminable]_

_[Audio Spike/Underterminable]_

_[Low Battery Warning: Deactivating]_

_Primary: Ah-ha! Found you, you little piece of…Low battery?_

_[Audio Spike]_

_Primary: Oh for the love of-_

_[Deactivating]

* * *

_

"Alright Slip, show me what you've got."

Slippy nodded and turned to his console.

Smaller asteroids were streaming by out the bridge viewport. The _Great Fox _banked and drifted around the occasional stray rock, but for the most part, they disintegrated harmlessly off the ships's forward armor. The ship's internal force compensators made the simple maneuvers almost unnoticeable to the crew within. But the odd shifting of the asteroid field from the point of view of the bridge made those less accustomed to the ship uneasy. From an occupied seat next to the navigational console in front, one of them spoke up, turning towards the commander's chair.

"Say Fox," Jason asked, nodding towards the viewport. "How come you don't just plow through those bigger rocks? Ship this size, your shields'd just eat them up."

"What's the matter? Getting sea sick?" Fox replied with a friendly smile. "I try not to power up the shields unless we need to; they've been…_modified_," he continued, emphasizing the last word with a pause. "They take a lot more of the ship's resources now. I'd rather risk a scratch here and there if we're not in combat."

Jason nodded thoughtfully, satisfied with the answer.

The viewport suddenly shifted from transparent to translucent blue, the black of space and lines of the asteroid field barely visible beneath the glowing new color. Over top the new hued surface, windows of information opened and closed as Slippy delved into files and folders. He typed away at the controls on his console, navigating the vast wealth of data contained in the recently cracked files he had been working on. It took the toad a few moments to find his way to the bits of information that were important, unfamiliar as he was with the data's structure.

Fox watched the rapid sorting of information with interest, leaning forward in his seat. He subconsciously scratched his cheek. Both he and Falco had time to wash off the dye they had used for their disguises on Shoana, but the chemicals used in the coloring left the skin beneath his orange fur irritated. He found the need to itch impossible to resist.

Gradually, some of the digital windows stayed open. One of them featured a slowly spinning wireframe of a large freighter, very similar to the model he and Falco had been paid to escort to Riley Freeport a few months prior. It was long and thin, with thicker sections at the head and tail, which were the bridge and engine block, respectively. Curved ribs jutted out from the 'spine', the spar that connected the front and rear. Though in almost all cases, the ribs would act like graspers holding prefilled cargo containers in place, in the wireframe they held nothing, giving the freighter the appearance of a skeletal, stick-like insect.

"_I wonder if Miyu…," _Fox thought to himself, turning his chair towards the lynx leaning against the bridge railing to his left.

She returned his glance with a smirk. "Looks familiar, eh?" she said, jerking a thumb towards the picture.

Fox smirked back. It was an extremely common model, and almost anyone who had ever flown in space could have claimed to see one in the shipping lanes. But Miyu had guessed what Fox was silently asking.

Next to the wireframe, another window opened and stuck. The second pane was a top-down map of the Lylat System. A red, shimmering line connected many of the planets and stations circling Lylat's star at acute angles; every time the line touched a location, it turned into a dot and sprouted a date above it. Most of the dates were in the past and faded to a dark grey, but the few future times remained bright white. The red line traced a rough circle around the system. The few remaining times were grouped towards the bottom left portion of the map, with points at Katina and Fortuna, and the final stop being an unnamed location deep in Sector X.

Finally, a third window sprouted open to take up most of the viewport. Amidst the shadows of Meteos in the background, the pane featured an ordered list that appeared to be a cargo manifest on one side, and a visual representation of whatever was highlighted in the list on the other. The window defaulted to the top-most item on the list, which appeared to be some sort of fruit-based foodstuff, according to the accompanying photo.

"Oh, this is good," Fox said, wholly absorbed in the wealth of information before him. "This is very good. Excellent job there Slip."

Slippy smiled at the praise and continued working.

"I found a few interesting things in the manifest," he said, speaking more or less into the console before him. As he did, the list on the viewport scrolled to highlight certain items. "Weapons, ammunition…all the usual s-suspect cargo for a contracted shipping service like Blue Arrow. But here."

The list scrolled to a stop on an item labeled _Miscellaneous. _The photo showed a pile of random boxes, the symbolic equivalent for 'all sorts of stuff.'

"According to the manifest, if this particular freighter is on time and keeping up with cargo, it's currently carrying over fifty tons of _miscellaneous _cargo. It makes up more percentage-wise than any other item of the ship's total shipping capacity."

"That's a lot of mystery cargo," Jason said, speaking the group's thoughts. "You'd think they'd actually go through the trouble of categorizing the stuff if there's that much of it."

"Unless they're trying to hide it," Miyu said thoughtfully, "I'm sure they can get around the enforced standard cap on unnamed cargo with a little creative bribery, and they just keep the 'miscellaneous' tag on there for show.

Slippy nodded and scrolled down the list some more, stopping at another item. "And then there's this one," he said. The item was labeled _Lot 110-343. _In the space for the picture, a message appeared along with an empty box.

"'No picture provided,'" Fox said out loud, reading the message.

"The item is the only entry on this list labeled with a numbering system like that," Slippy continued, "And it's the only item without a matching photo."

"Sounds like we found our freighter then," Fox said.

"I don't know," Jason commented, glancing back at the other vulpine, "It all seems strange that they'd even bother putting this stuff _on _the manifest in the first place. I mean, if they're trying to keep it secret, why take the risk?"

"Ancient shipping bylaws," Miyu answered, drawing the room's attention. "When a freighter checks into a port, they have to provide a manifest. In most public ports, the dock authorities have the right to randomly search someone's cargo. If the actual cargo and the manifest don't match up, someone will raise an alarm about it."

"So the DAs won't get suspicious with a naming inconsistency like _that_, but they will if there's a box unaccounted for?" Fox asked with curiosity. "Seems a little odd."

Miyu shrugged. "You'd be surprised how well simple little psychological tricks like that work. If you tell a man 'that's a box', he'll ask what's in it." She raised one hand to illustrate, continuing as she raised the other, "You tell the same man 'that's a box of thingamajigs', he'll roll his eyes and ask for the next item on the list. Someone expects to see mundane, categorized data, you give him mundane, categorized data."

Fox nodded thoughtfully, mulling over the idea.

"How'd you figure that out?" Jason asked skeptically.

Miyu shrugged a second time. "I did a lot of work with smugglers; you don't hang around a bunch of folks like that without learning a few things."

Jason whistled low and turned to Fox. "Well Mr. McCloud, you've got quite the crew here. Mercenaries, smugglers, ex-military…vicious ex-lovers. Quite the variety indeed." He tossed the other fox a smirk before a sound from the hallway caught his attention. "Oh, speaking of which…"

Fox laughed, running a hand through his hair as he too caught the distinctive sound of two people cursing at each other.

The doors to the bridge were kept open, so no mechanical sound announced the arrival of Falco and Katt, but they were noticed right away as they stepped into the room.

Falco lead by a stride or two, coming to a halt just inside the door and turning towards Fox, who looked on with interest. Katt continued on past avian and crossed the bridge, taking up residence opposite Miyu. She sat on the railing to the right of Fox and swung her legs over, letting them dangle in the air. Both of their faces were sculpted expressions of silent frustration.

"I called you two to the bridge a half hour ago," Fox said with only mild concern. He was surprised they even bothered to show up at all. "What's up?"

Falco cleared his throat.

"Sorry for the delay Fox," he began, his tone unnaturally official, to the point Fox found it eerie. "After much negotiation, Katt has agreed to shut her trap long enough to hear what's going on."

Fox glanced at Katt, who promptly smiled at Falco and curled her paw into a fist, allowing only the middle finger to point towards the ceiling.

Fox rolled his eyes and rubbed his temples. "Alright," he sighed, eyes still covered by his palm. "I can't believe I have to tell a pair of fully grown adults this…fully grown in _body_, if not in _mind_, that is…but here it goes." His hand fell from his face and his voice dropped to a mutter. "Help me out here, Peppy."

"I will not have behavior like this on my ship," Fox said, raising his voice to a stern volume. A beat of silence passed before his thinly pressed lips curled into an exasperated smile. "I mean, I feel like I'm talking to children here, but there's no other way to do this. Falco, Katt, I know you don't have the greatest amount of respect for each other, but for the love of Sol, please try to hold it together while the rest of us have to deal with this miserable, miserable experience."

The bridge fell silent. The eyes of four of the beings in the room flipped rapidly from Katt to Falco and back, expecting them to acknowledge their tongue lashing, but neither did. Indeed, the two never broke eye contact with each other, nor the scowl painted on both of their faces. Moments stretched on.

"…I'll take that as gold you agree," Fox finally said. "Good. Glad we could talk about this. Moving on…Slippy?"

Slippy perked up. "What? Oh, right. H-hold on…" He briefly spun back to his console and looked at a few things before turning towards the group again. "According to the schedule, _Lot 110-343 _has another unique anomaly; it's the only item that never leaves the freighter. The set delivery location is a Yohan Depot in Sector X."

"That…doesn't make any sense." Fox mused out loud, "If that lot really is Peppy, then that's where he was first picked up. Why would they put him on a freighter, send him around Lylat, and then drop him back off at Yohan?"

"They wouldn't," Miyu interjected. "That's another smuggling trick. Always list the stuff you don't want people looking at as being offloaded somewhere else. That way, the authorities at any given port won't even give it a second look." Miyu smirked. "You can never underestimate the desire to be lazy. A DA sees cargo as bound for elsewhere, they'll see it as 'not my problem' and move right along."

"So…that lot could've been dropped off anywhere along the route?" Fox asked.

"That's probably the case," Slippy replied as Miyu nodded.

The lynx continued. "The only way we'd know for sure _where _it was unloaded is if we could get some sort of records from either the freighter itself, or from each of the ports it stopped at. Security camera footage, DA logs, something like that."

Gears began turning and pieces began falling into place in Fox's head. "Searching every port the ship stopped would be impossible, even with a nice list," he said solemnly, nodding towards the map. "We'd have to obtain the freighter's actual logs."

"Oh, but there's no guarantee they'd even have that sort of thing documented," Katt offered, contributing for the first time since she and Falco entered the bridge. "They're already trying a lot to keep this secret; I wouldn't be surprised if they hid that part, too. It's a shady lead at best."

"It may be our _only_ lead though," Fox countered, leaning forward in his chair. "I mean, we're following a very thin thread as it is. This might be the best chance we have to pick up Peppy's trail."

"Alright then," Miyu summarized. "So how are we going to track down this freighter?"

"I believe I may be of some service in this department, Cap'n," Jason spoke up. "Logistics are something of a specialty of mine."

"That's right; Falco told me," Fox said, offering the bird a smirk before looking at the grey vulpine. "You were a Combort, weren't you?"

Jason laughed a bit, smiling and acknowledging the friendly jab. He put his hands up as though fending off an attack. "You know, I honestly missed the old nicknames."

"Wait," Miyu interjected, looking rapidly from fox to fox. "_Combort_?"

"Combat Support," Jason answered, lolling his head towards her and casting the lynx a side long glance. He kept his smile. "A lot of the Stick Jockeys didn't hold my particular chosen path of higher military education in the highest of regards."

Falco's lips curled into a smile, and he seemed to momentarily forget Katt's presence in the room. "Ha! _Military _my ass. So how many kills didya rack up in the spreadsheet sims, anyway? I'm sure you've got all sorts of enthralling stories."

"See?"

Everyone shared a good-natured laugh at that.

"Well okay then Jason," Fox finally continued, "Be my guest. Shed some light here for us."

"Alright. So, you've got a target here, and an awfully big area to hunt for it. But, according to the map," Jason said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, "Two of the three docking stops left are set for early tomorrow, if your ship's clock is set to Cornerian Standard. Fortuna and Katina. Now, what do you notice about the arrival times on those?"

"They're close," Fox said, curling his fingers in front of his chin in a gesture of thought as he analyzed the times. "A little too close, actually. If the freighter's on schedule, it'll have to leave Fortuna for Katina less than…one hour after setting down there."

"Must be a light stop on Fortuna," Miyu observed. "Probably not even time for refueling."

"Exactly," Jason commended, clapping his hands together. He began gesturing with his paws directly after. "So we've got a rough estimated time of departure. And, knowing the _ridiculous_ efficiency standards of interplanetary transportation companies, Blue Arrow's going to have the freighter burn along the most direct line between those two planets. So we've got a rough path of transit. Put those together with the scheduled time of arrival on Katina, and…"

"We've got some coordinates," Fox finished, eyes brightening considerably. He qualified his response. "Rough, foggy coordinates perhaps, but coordinates none the less."

"W-we'll have to change course right away," Slippy said, "We're on the opposite side of Meteos from Katina and it'll take a while to pick our way through the field. Even if we take our chances and stick to the trade lanes."

"Do it," Fox nodded. "And do it manually. The autopilot's over-cautious around asteroids; we won't get there in time."

Slippy smiled and jumped down from his seat and waddled to another, this one located directly under the bridge's viewport. Jumping up, he activated the console and grabbed a steering column as it deployed from the station. He flexed his stubby fingers around the control bars of the column. It wasn't often the _Great Fox_, or any large ship for that matter, was piloted manually, so Slippy relished the chances he got to directly control the carrier.

Fox smirked as he watched his enthusiastic friend take up the task. The toad didn't even ask when he was going to be relieved, and the trip would most likely take all night.

"What about my ship?"

Fox sighed, glancing towards Katt. "Yeah…about that. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you and Jason to bear with us for a bit longer." He watched the feline snort derisively and cross her arms. "You're welcome to whatever supplies you can scrounge from our hanger to work on your reactor, but if we're going to catch this freighter, we're not going to make it back to Shoana."

Fox thought he heard Falco mutter something about an airlock being the quickest way to the Freeport, but he ignored it.

"Fine with me," Jason offered brightly, sensing the tension in the room. "Just keep me away from the action and I'll be peachy. I could even give you a hand planning the whole deal if you like."

"I'd appreciate it," Fox replied, giving a curt but genuine smile.

"Whatever," Katt said, rolling her eyes. She dropped her arms and strode out of the room, careful to make it obvious she was avoiding eye contact with Falco as she strutted past the avian.

The rest of the bridge took it as a sign that the meeting was over, and, except for Slippy, followed suit, making for the doors.

As their footsteps echoed down the metal hall, Fox increased his pace to a jog to catch up with Falco, already several strides ahead. The bird had his fists shoved in his pockets, shoulders hunched and head bent down in a posture of brooding. It was fairly clear that, thanks to the news that the _Great Fox_'s newest passengers would be staying longer than expected, he didn't want to be bothered. Fox saw the darkness on his friend's face, and knew what the reaction would probably be to his words, but the vulpine managed to push them out anyway.

"Listen, until we get this sorted out, I don't want you starting fights with her, alright? This whole thing is complicated enough as it is without you two screaming up and down the halls."

"Oh don't worry Fox," Falco replied with an edge, "The less I see of that creature's ugly face the better. I'll be in my bunk."

* * *

Corneria loomed large in front of High Admiral Markiss.

Staring at the planet's image floating above his bridge's main projector, the aging wolf could feel the weight of the giant rock resting heavy on his shoulders. The digital image rotated slowly, bobbing ever so slightly as it did. The greens and browns of the planet's primary landmasses had been lovingly rendered by some programmer with idle time on his hands; the blue oceans looked like they'd be wet if one reached into the suspended colors and touched them. Simulated clouds played out random weather patterns, adding just one more layer to an already very convincing simulation. The real planet was not far away, relatively speaking, but the true image of it was hidden behind layer upon layer of metal.

The traditional, nautical ideal of a 'bridge' – the exposed nerve center of a massive ship surrounded by panoramic windows – had been quickly phased out soon after warships had first been deployed in space. They made no tactical sense. A single well placed round from an enemy's lesser guns could break through the viewports and vent the entirety of the ship's command staff into the vacuum. It didn't take a military engineer to know that the safest place for such a command center was behind as much armor and shielding as physically possible.

The bridge of the _Midnight Howl_ was no exception. Nestled deep within the Cornerian Navy's flagship, the command room was a series of concentric circles, each one placed lower as they moved towards the center. The pit in the middle was home to the main projector and a number of flat projectors, around which paced the uppermost echelon of the Cornerian Military. Every row radiating outward was home to a number of bridge officers, coordinating the innumerous tasks necessary to keep the massive ship operating smoothly.

One of these bridge officers spoke a few finals words into her headset before removing it and standing up from her post. She made her way down to the projector at the center of the bridge, coming to a sharp halt beside the High Admiral and snapping off a rigid salute.

"High Admiral, sir," she said, waiting for the commander of the Cornerian Navy to slowly turn away from the image of Corneria before him and acknowledge her. "Admiral Gage has finished uploading his combat report."

Markiss accepted the digital clipboard the bridge officer offered him, tabbing through the pages with a look of disapproval.

"Correct me if I am wrong, Lieutenant, but were you not present in the briefing a few months ago where I outlined the duty of Admiral Gage and the Seventh Fleet?"

"I was, sir," the officer replied.

"Then do an old man a favor and refresh my memory," he said wryly. His tired, gravely voice conveyed the familiarity of his tone. "Did I not inform Admiral Gage that his target was Warlord Bauker and his gathered assets?"

"You did."

"Then I don't suppose the good Admiral has explained why he has been engaged in full scale, offensive combat operations with Warlord O'Donnell? Last our intelligence heard, Bauker has no assets anywhere near that mercenary's base on the second moon of Fortuna."

"He ah, did, sir," the Lieutenant replied, sounding somewhat unsure of herself. It appeared that she was just as confused as the older wolf. "Admiral Gage reports that a large strike force from his fleet was refueling and rearming at a small armory near Fortuna when a raiding party from Warlord O'Donnell's base attacked. According to his report, the raiding party was driven off, and Admiral Gage felt it was in the best interest of his strike force and the civilians aboard the armory that he order the full scale destruction of Warlord O'Donnell's base."

Markiss breathed heavily, letting his sight drift to the floating picture of Corneria. He felt its weight again, pulling his proud, war-tested frame towards the deck.

"But Warlord Bauker has no reported assets near Fortuna. What was Gage's strike force doing there in the first place?"

* * *

"_I feel like I shouldn't be here."_

The darkness of the room overwhelmed her, flooding her naked eyes with nothingness. The distant _thrum _of propulsion machinerylet her mind know she was still conscious, but if it weren't for that oddly comforting sound, she'd be lost.

Miyu lay on her back, her body cradled by freshly cycled sheets and cushioning. One hand rested easy on her stomach, tapping out some imagined beat, while the other had sought the comfortable coolness of a pillow's underside. She hadn't turned off the lamp five minutes before the sudden wave of exhaustion that had hit her on the way to her quarters evaporated into the blackness, leaving her wide awake and patiently waiting for its return.

"_Should I not be here?"_

The occasional shadows cast so briefly when some device's status light blipped on and off caught her attention every so often. They startled her at first, but as the minutes went on and sleep continued to evade her, she grew indifferent. Instead, she began to notice a distinct heaviness in the air, pushing down on her from all sides. It proved difficult to put a finger on why she was experiencing the feeling, and it only added to her frustration.

Spots danced on the lightless ceiling as the lynx continued to stare it down. She remember when she was a child and the dull little splotches summoned her curiosity every night when her parents tucked her in. They were barely noticeable above the solid darkness of the bedroom, but they were always there, shifting away just before she could focus on one. When Miyu found out eventually that they were no different than the spots seen when one closes their eyes, she had been disappointed, but lost interest quickly. Now she paid attention to them, if only to distract herself from the thickness of the air.

She had to break it. She had to do something.

"Seriously, should I not be here right now?"

The room answered her spoken words with silence. Miyu paused a moment before shaking her head and laughing. The moment of clarity always came too late to interfere with the moment of terror.

"_Of course; this is Peppy's room. It's going to feel weird for no other reason than he's not here."_

Her words to nobody and internal realization seemed to cut through the weight, and the room suddenly breathed easier. But she was no closer to sleep.

Miyu sighed, mashing her palms into her eyes. This was getting ridiculous. She needed something to tire her mind out.

Reaching over with a grunt, she tapped the base of the table lamp beside the bed, filling the room with soft, ambient illumination. It was plenty to see by, but not enough to scald her retinas after sitting in the dark for so long.

The lynx sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed, allowing the pads of her feet to touch flat on the floor below.

Miyu shivered briefly as the warmth of the heavy covers disappeared, but quickly grew adjusted to the room's pleasantly cool temperature. She wore the black shirt she had borrowed from Fox earlier in the day in addition to her own undergarments, providing enough coverage to move about comfortably. And fortunately, unlike some of the Star Fox mercenaries, Peppy appeared to have appreciated the necessity of a comfortable walking surface in a bedroom; the soft carpeting clung to the soles of her feet.

She looked around the sleeping space with curiosity, noting a number of personal items the owner had scattered about with great care; neatness appeared to be a virtue in the hare's book. And whatever personal items Rhena had acquired during her stay with the Star Fox team were apparently important enough to take along with her, as there was no trace of the wolf's belongings anywhere. Besides the bed against the wall of the small room, a desk stood out as the other prominent piece of furniture, accompanied by a dresser and smallish night table adjacent to the cot. Seeing no other outlet for her curiosity, Miyu pushed herself to her feet and padded over to the desk's chair, sitting down with a sigh and staring for a moment at the nearly empty surface.

All the requisite items the lynx expected one like Peppy to have on his desk were present as she looked around. A number of pictures occupied the corners, containing a few people Miyu recognized and a few she didn't. She picked them up in turn and studied them, careful to replace them in the same spot and position they had originally been in.

The first was a smallish panoramic shot of very familiar subjects. Peppy Hare himself sat in an exquisite leather chair with one leg crossed over the other, arms crossed at the chest; however, a smile on his face robbed the posture of any possible dourness. Standing arrayed around him were the rest of the Star Fox team, looking almost identical to how she had seen them in the past day, indicating the young age of the photograph. The background was a solid, attractive color, making it fairly obvious the picture was taken at a professional studio. Miyu smiled as she replaced the picture, imagining the trouble the elder hare probably went through to get Fox and especially Falco to sit still and agree to smile for the occasion.

The next photo's frame was an intricate work of silver metal shaped like interwoven branches, carved by hand apparently, given the imperfections and tool marks she could make out. In the photo, a much younger Peppy was holding an equally young woman from behind, resting his chin on her shoulder as both hares smiled for the photographer. A tree imperfectly framed behind them and slight lens flare indicated the spontaneity of the photo.

Miyu couldn't help but smile at the utter sweetness of the two. The sincere smile, the carved beginnings of laugh lines; they looked so alive and full of love. She briefly wondered where the photo had been taken, who had taken it, and a number of other minute little details. However, before long, her smile faded into a sullen line when a single thought crossed her mind.

"_Where is she now?"_

It was obvious the two were probably married, or a cultural equivalent if not. But if that were true, then why wasn't she with him on the _Great Fox_? Miyu thought it over, but couldn't come up with any solution to the question that didn't cause a pang of sympathetic t remorse in her heart.

She was gone from him. Either by will or by chance, the woman in the photo was no longer a present part of Peppy's life. Maybe she died tragically premature. Perhaps she couldn't take the lifestyle Peppy offered her and left him. Or maybe there was something else, something deeper. But regardless of the correct answer, the entity that had so obviously meant so much to the old mercenary was lost.

Miyu sniffed and replaced the frame, wiping the shiny wetness from her eyes. She was surprised; she hadn't expected to be taken aback emotionally so easily. But remembering the few chance encounters she had had with the hare, she had gained a liking to him. The lynx knew full well that it wasn't the case at the time, but retrospectively, she could appreciate the good natured smile that always seemed plastered to his face, even during that period a month ago when she was being difficult with the team.

The idea that something so sad could happen to someone so sweet and genuine just seemed wrong to her.

Miyu closed her eyes and took a breath to clear her emotions. When she opened her eyes again, she noticed a third photograph on the desk, this one surrounded by a rough, steel frame.

She inspected it closely and noticed immediately that of the three beings, the hare depicted within it was obviously Peppy. And from the look of it, the picture was taken roughly the same time as the pervious photo; he was young. In fact, he looked like he could be roughly Miyu's age.

The younger Peppy was draped over the wing of a starfighter in a docking bay somewhere, back on the steel and stomach to the sky. His head, dangling upside down, was facing the camera as he gave the photographer a goofy grin and matching thumbs up which, due to his orientation, was actually pointing towards the ground. He was dressed in a mechanic's jumpsuit, though it didn't exactly look like he was being a much use to the other two at the moment.

Beneath the same wing, though closer to the fuselage of the fighter, was a swine of unusually fit proportions for his species. His back was to the picture taker as he rooted an arm elbow-deep in a toolbox. What little bit of his face was visible showed an indifferent expression, as though he only cared about getting his job done. It struck Miyu as oddly monotonous of him; surely he knew the picture was being taken? Peppy certainly seemed to have had prior warning, as did the final subject of the picture.

A tall, lean fox sat on a step ladder just below the cockpit of the fighter. The grin he offered was slim and weary, but looked authentic. His rusty face was covered with oily grease stains, and his jumpsuit was torn and smeared. He had his hands dangling between his knees, bracing himself on his elbows as his back hunched over. In his hands he clutched a pair of dark sunglasses.

There was something about the last person that caught Miyu's attention, and reminded her of Fox. Obviously, he was too young to have been in the picture with Peppy, but the resemblance between the two vulpine was uncanny. In fact, the stance even…

Miyu gasped as a flashback abruptly overtook her. Her mind flickered to the image of Fox earlier in the day in his room, contemplating things after she had revealed her situation to him. The way he was hunched over, hands between his knees. The way he offered her the same, slim grin.

"Father…" she whispered out loud.

Her mind immediately followed the same track as with the picture of Peppy's love before, and she wondered where the father was in all this. The elder McCloud was clearly a pilot, or someone who knew his was around a starfighter at least. And if the picture was any evidence, he was good friends with Peppy. Wouldn't he have made a perfect fit for a mercenary squad? Something must have happened to him.

Only as she dawned on the last thought did she realize that she had let go of the photo in surprise.

It fell to the carpeted floor with a muffled, inaudible crack of glass and hiss of air, leading Miyu to briefly hope that she hadn't damaged the clear material in the frame. However, the hope was dashed as she leaned down from the chair and flipped the weighty frame over, revealing a hodgepodge of pristinely cut glass shards. Atop the glass, the back of the picture stared at up at her.

She cursed quietly, looking around quickly as though she were afraid someone would walk in and discover what she done. Placing the frame back on the desk, she reached down for the picture. As she did though, she paused. There was writing on the back of it, scribbled in faded pen.

Before she could even look away or consider the concept of not looking at one's personal notes, the first phrase jumped out at her.

_KEEP READING._

Miyu froze. Her ear twitched. Gears in her mind ground to a halt, and she quickly decided she would obey the note's command.

_If you're reading this Fox, it means I have, unfortunately, passed away. Hopefully it was in a manner where I was able to tell you where this note is. Just in case it wasn't though, I wrote it in the one place I knew you'd look after going through my things. If that's the case, it has probably been a while since my demise; James was always proud of how respectful you were as a boy, and I know it probably took you awhile before you could bring yourself to clean out my room._

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Miyu heard a voice telling her to stop, but she couldn't pay any heed.

_James would have been proud of everything you've become, Fox. And you know that I am too. You know everything I'm about to say; or at least I hope you do. I know I never made it a habit of expressing my sheer awe of who you've grown up to be, but I'd like to think that you've picked up on it. I said it once before, and I'll say it again. You're becoming just like your father. I can't think of any better or more truthful praise than that._

Miyu smiled, briefly wondering what her parents would think about her current lot in life.

_But that's not why I'm writing this down. You've probably already heard the full length edition of "Peppy's Greatest Heartfelt Expressions" at the reading of my will. This is about something else. This is about something your father entrusted me with. Something I couldn't risk some legal desk jockey with. And just in case I never got a chance to tell you myself, I needed to make sure the words didn't die with me._

_You see, there is something you need to know about your father and I. Before you were born, and Pigma (may he rest in plenty of the tiniest pieces) joined up with us, we weren't exactly mercenaries. We weren't exactly soldiers, either. Heck, we didn't technically exist._

_Did you ever wonder where we got the Great Fox? Or those hyper-experimental Arwings?_

_The Cornerian Military wouldn't acknowledge our existence. They have no written records of us. If you ask the Cornerian Brass about us, you'll be quietly taken aside and shot._

_Fox, your father and I were Angels._

Miyu's eyes bored into the last phrase she read until she felt like she was seeing past it into the thick paper of the photograph. She slapped the picture on the desk and withdrew her hand, staring at it like it would jump off the counter and attack her at any moment.

Angels. Spectres of death. The last thing anyone in their crosshairs ever saw.

Miyu heard all of the stories; all of the whispered tales of the ghost pilots that haunted the corners of the Lylat System. The rumors started as the Angels being a secret branch of the Cornerian Military, organized to quietly deal with threats rendered invulnerable by various streams of red tape and the entire concept of the 'public eye,' or deemed too dangerous to acknowledge publicly. Their overt targets were public figures and 'tolerated' evils; the kind of people everyone knew were no good, but were so integral to the infrastructure of civilization that nobody would even consider doing something about. Corrupt police chiefs, politicians with a little bit too much untraceable funding, arrogant drug lords who claimed to be holding up their communities. They feared no response from civil society. But they feared the Angels.

This would have been enough for any other black ops unit, but the Angels were special.

They were given almost complete autonomy in choosing their targets and carrying out missions. It was done intentionally by the council of Admirals who created them, in order to prevent any possible influencing by political motives, as even military officials were known to succumb to on occasion. An exhaustive screening process was probably involved, Miyu assumed, though it'd be insane to believe anyone claiming to know of such a procedure.

However, this amount of autonomy also meant that the Admiralty had no idea of what the Angels were doing at any given time. So when the organization all but vanished, or at least the results of their operations stopped being noticed, there was little anyone could do.

To think that she had not only _seen_ one, but _talked_ to an Angel without even knowing, Miyu felt like she in fact seen the divine entity the group was named after.

Her eyes fell back on the picture, staring the few words she had yet to read down. She hummed for a moment, ending it with a sigh as she snatched the picture back up.

_I know you believe me. You probably had some doubt, maybe put the picture down for a bit, but you know that I am telling you the truth._

_So you know how important it is that you follow these instructions._

_There is something else that you should know. There aren't many of us left. And there is a very good reason for that. The entire story lies with ROB._

_Go to him, and tell him to access the Great Fox's daily report for 'Operation Day Minus One.' He'll say that no such file exists. Then tell him the password. You know the one. If something has happened to ROB, check the Great Fox's databanks. ROB was programmed to upload the data of interest there in case of emergency._

_You could say that I will see you there._

The writing stopped. Miyu slapped the picture down on the desk again, this time letting her finger tips linger on it. Her mind tried to open wide enough to take everything in, but it was having difficulty wrapping itself around what she had just read.

Fox's father was an Angel, and the vulpine had no clue. _Peppy _was an Angel, and nobody had any idea. Her first impulse was to sprint to Fox's room and show him the words, but how would she explain how she had come across it? She was snooping through the hare's personal belongings? She was under enough suspicion as it was by the entire team, and probably still Fox as well. Telling him wouldn't do anything to help her case.

But what a find! How could she keep something like it a secret? If it were her father someone had discovered something profound about, she'd want to know right away. Wouldn't she?

Satisfied by the simple logic, Miyu picked up the picture again and stood. But as soon as she stood up, she stopped.

The words were gone.

The last phrase on the back of the picture could barely be made out, and as Miyu watched it with wide eyes, what little ink remained disappeared right in front of her. The material was utterly blank.

The sense that she wasn't welcome in the room returned almost immediately, and her throat quickly became thick.

Startled and not entirely sure what she was looking for, she grabbed for the broken frame.

Amidst the series of broken glass shards that clattered to the desk as she lifted it up, a tiny, micro-chip like device fell to the counter. Miyu touched the flat, tiny box no bigger than her finger nail. It was a miniature air pump. The picture had been kept in a vacuum.

The ink was reacting to the air of the bedroom. It was supposed to disappear after being read.

The thinly clad lynx shivered. She had suddenly become very cold.

* * *

The sterility. The rhythm of the oxygen pump. The sound of the heart monitor. They were all familiar sounds to him.

"…_I'm not sure I'm alright with that," _Fox thought. The vulpine leaned against the wall just beside the doorframe of the small medical bay, arms crossed and eyes fixed in a ponderous trance.

Linka's mostly shrouded form occupied most of his vision, covered to the neck with a thick woolen blanket someone had found somewhere on the ship. Her chest slowly inched up and down beneath the heavy material, assisted by the mask fitted tightly over her muzzle. The squeal of the worn device faded into the background noise of the room, and failed to penetrate his thoughts.

Bill's impromptu surgery had apparently gone well, all things considered. Before leaving with Rhena, the hound had been kind enough to sanitize and clean his equipment, but the bandages and stitches zigzagging their way over the coyote's face let Fox know the surgery had happened. They dressings were white and unsoiled, at least telling him that the girl's body was repairing itself. There would be scars. Her right ear was completely gone, with little more than a stump remaining. But she was alive, and that was all anyone could ask for.

During the month past, Fox had spoken at length with Bill regarding the young pilot that lay before him. Besides the obvious admiration for the kid earning her pilot's wings so young, the mercenary had developed a brotherly fondness of the coyote for her self-reliance, and her quiet presence in the room during mission briefings. After learning about her past, the respect only grew.

Bill had told him that her history literally began at the Cornerian Military Academy. No parents, no connections, just a pup that showed up one day at the school's front door, like something out of a story book. She might have ended up at an orphanage had someone on the school's maintenance crew not taken pity on the young coyote. It was an interesting oddity, Bill had noted; when he looked into her history after she first joined his squadron, those sparse facts were all he could find. For whatever reason, nobody on the maintenance crew had stepped forward and claimed to be the guardian of Linka during those early years. It was probably safe to assume it had been a group effort; that the school itself had raised her.

When she was old enough, the Academy just enrolled her in the early classes. She aced them all, a byproduct of literally growing up in the system, though her own mental brilliance could hardly be overlooked. She graduated years ahead of her time and moved on to Flight School, and was one of the youngest pilots ever assigned to a squadron.

And that was it.

Linka Pyrokanzia was born an orphan, schooled for a little over a decade, and released into full military service not halfway into her teenage years. It was all written, plain as day in her records. All that was left to mystery was her origin. And that blue cloth.

Fox looked beside the bed. It had been left on a counter nearby, probably taken off when Bill performed his surgery. The hound had said that she always had it with her for some reason that he couldn't coax out of her. Whenever Bill had brought up the subject, she just clammed up, though that wasn't saying much considering how quiet she tended to be.

Fox's eyes returned to hers, encased behind her motionless eyelids.

Even if Bill had nothing to do with her, Fox wouldn't have felt any hesitation extending what little medical service they could to her aid. And if the hound was right, and Linka _had_ felt like she had found herself a home, however temporary, with the mercenary crew, it only solidified the vulpine's stance.

The breath machine cycled, pumping air in and out of the unconscious coyote's lungs once more. Her heartbeat was slow, but steady.

"Getting Déjà vu?"

Fox jumped a little and turned his head towards the door of the medical bay.

"…'Cuz I think I am," Miyu continued, rubbing her forehead. She glanced at Fox and smiled, letting her hand fall to her hip. "Couldn't sleep?"

"Nah," he replied quietly, as if Linka would awaken if they were too loud. He returned the smile. "Slippy's shift at the helm is almost up, so I thought I'd drop in here to make sure she's alright before I relieve him."

"Mm," Miyu acknowledged, letting the room fall silent.

The breathing machine cycled again.

"Listen Fox," the lynx started, sounding unsure of herself. "I…I think I found something in Peppy's room-"

Before she could finish, the wall came alive and rushed into her, crushing into her back and throwing her to the ground. Fox met an equal fate, and ended up beside her on his stomach, sprawled out and eyes wide. Various tools and bits of equipment clattered to the ground around them, and for some reason, the first thought Miyu could put together was a silent prayer of thanks that Bill had put away all the sharp surgery instruments.

A deep rumble echoed through the ship and into the pair via the deck plates they found themselves on. While Miyu lay stunned for a moment longer, Fox immediately pushed himself to his feet, wavering for a second as he regained his bearings. A quick check proved Linka still lay quietly atop the cot, strapped in tightly. Seeing Miyu still struggling to stand, he abandoned politeness and wrapped an arm around her waist, firmly guiding her to her feet. He then took a shuffle step and dashed into the hallway, shouting for her to follow over his shoulder.

The stairs flew by three at a time as Fox bounded up them, the warning klaxons finally beginning to sound. The upper corridor lights were pulsing red by the time he reached them. One final dash, and before his mind caught up with him, he found himself looking over Slippy's shoulders on the bridge.

"What the hell happened?" he sputtered out, even as Slippy began reacting to his presence. "Did you hit something?"

"No!" the toad replied, frantically cycling through pages of information on his console. "There's barely anything _to _hit!"

Fox glanced out the bridge's massive viewport and agreed; they were almost through Meteos. The asteroid field was so thin Slippy probably could've left the _Great Fox _on autopilot. A small debris field loomed ahead with some chunks of metal large enough to cause damage, centered around an opaque cloud of grey vapor, but it was still a ways off. The rest of the space in front of them was practically dust.

"Wait!" Slippy called out, jabbing a finger at the radar circle in front of him. "There's somebody-"

The second blast would've thrown the toad into his console head first had he not been wearing his seat's crash harness. Fox wasn't so lucky.

Even as his body was punished a second time by the ship he called home, he heard a yip of pain from behind him. Miyu had made it to the bridge in time to get hurtled against the doorframe.

Before the lynx even got back to her feet, Fox was pushing himself up once again and headed towards his chair in the center of the bridge. He fell into the seat hard and immediately began inputting commands. The background thrum of the _Great Fox _suddenly increased sharply in frequency, and the space outside the bridge's viewport gradually took on a faint, bluish tint.

"Shields are up!" he barked. "Slippy, what did you see? Who's out there?"

"I don't know! I don't know!" the toad shrieked back. "The radar's s-still spotty. We're not out of the dead zone yet!"

Fox keyed his seat's com, activating the ship's communications system. "Falco, prep the Arwings." He could hear his own voice echoing through speakers in the corridor outside the bridge as it did the same throughout the _Great Fox_. He turned back to Slippy. "Divert anything unnecessary into the engines, get us out-"

He stopped as Slippy opened a digital window on the bridge's viewport showing the view from the ship's rear camera.

"…Holy shit."

Against the backdrop of Meteos, with Corneria a faint dot far off in the distance, Fox could make out the ambient glow of nearly half a dozen engines trails. They were arranged in a vertical box, with the fifth and largest of the hollow lights occupying the center. Though it was difficult to make out given the distance, a quick zoom in response to Slippy's input brought the middle ship into the proverbial light.

Fox squinted at the lowered resolution of the camera, and could barely make out the ship's angular nose and distinctive main guns, flanking the bridge on either side. Given their point of a view, it was impossible to get any other visual data from the camera, but it was enough for the toad to mentally make a match.

"That's a _Slingshot_-class!" Slippy exclaimed as a sixth, much brighter flare suddenly appeared on the rear camera, emitted from the ship in question.

While the distance between the _Great Fox _and the pursuing ships was still large enough to give the illusion of safety, the new light raced across the cloud of dust with frightening velocity. Luckily, Slippy had enough presence of mind to take up the control yoke in front of him, and nudged it to the side.

Fox felt the slight pull of the maneuver as he noticed Miyu finally made it to an open seat and strapped in. A sharp illumination drew his eyes back to the viewport, as the new source of light abruptly soared into view in front of the _Great Fox_, narrowly missing the vessel and revealing itself as a concentrated projectile of energy.

"What's a _Slingshot_?" Miyu asked, eyes still glued to the viewport as the burst of energy outpaced them and eventually dissipated.

"Cornerian frigate," Fox replied, "Specializes in distance engagements. It's a miracle their first shots missed the engines."

"Radar's b-back online," Slippy added.

"Can we outrun it?" Miyu said, glancing back at the vulpine.

"It caught up to us, didn't it?" Fox replied, merely stating fact. He turned to the toad and pointed out the viewport. "Slippy, see if you can get us to that debris field. Maybe we can lose 'em in that vapor cloud, or at least find some time to turn and fight."

"We're going to fight a _Cornerian_ frigate_?_" Slippy shot back, his voice squeaking a little and his eyes widening. "B-but that's treason! We, we-"

"We're already wanted for that! They haven't tried to get us to surrender, so they're not here to take prisoners, and I'd rather not wait and see if they're going to play nice."

Slippy stared, mouth agape at his friend for a moment before turning back to his console. A light on his radar started flashing.

"F-fighters! They're launching fighters!" he shouted, quickly dropping his shock at learning where their situation might end up. He continued speaking, though to himself in a quieter tone. "Since when does a _Slingshot _carry fighters?"

Fox spat out a curse, keying the ship's com again. "Falco, double time. Miyu and I are coming down."

Miyu spun her chair around and looked at the vulpine again. "I am?"

Fox sprang to his feet and made for the bridge doors. "You are. If those fighters get inside our shields they'll be able to take out our engines no problem. Slippy's staying here, and you're our only other pilot. Let's go."

Miyu, to her credit, gave no further objection and quickly followed him, unbuckling herself from her seat and bounding towards the hallway in pursuit.

"What about me?" Slippy shrieked after them.

"Just get us to the debris field. Pour everything into the engines; ditch the shields if you have to. We'll hold 'em off!" Fox called back over his shoulder, ducking into the stair well and reversing the course he took just moments before.

* * *

The rumbling of the docking bay doors parting in front of him greeted Fox with a thin but gradually expanding vista of the Lylat System. The burning star that was Sol sat off to one side, dimmed a little by the barely visible dust field the _Great Fox _was currently carving a path through. The Arwing's auto-dimmers filtered out most of the rest of the glare. A field of scrap lay off in the distance as a blob of dots, though it was slowly gaining size as they neared it. What looked like tiny particles against the cool yellow of Sol would soon be jagged and rent hunks of steel and metal.

Of course, they had to get there alive first.

Falco's face appeared in the corner of Fox's HUD.

"So tell me again what's going on, Fox?" he asked, fully alert but still rubbing the last vestiges of an interrupted sleep from his eyes. "I mean, who attacks at this ungodly hour? It's downright uncivilized."

Fox smirked and glanced to his left. He had managed to calm himself a bit since the initial shock of realizing they were under attack a minute ago, and it showed in the light-hearted smile he threw his friend.

"Who else? Cornerians." he replied, rewarded with a chuckle from the avian.

"Oh, of course."

"What happens if their fighters start attacking us?" Miyu asked from the Arwing on Fox's right.

"Push the big red trigger on the big plastic stick in front of you."

"We don't have a choice," Fox added to Falco's sarcastic advice, "They aren't declaring themselves, and they're clearly hostile."

"Think of it as self defense," Falco added, "It just so happens that we're defending ourselves from the largest military in Lylat."

"Thanks, that helps," Miyu said, rolling her eyes.

The bay doors came to a halt as Fox engaged his fighter's engine system.

With a lively _thrum_, his Arwing lifted slowly off the deck beneath it, hovering on its vertical jets as its landing struts retracted into the streamlined body. On either side of him his wingmates were doing the same. As soon as he was high enough to be clear of the sole remaining CDF Fighter, he engaged the Arwing's thrusters and glided out of the bay, followed closely by Falco and Miyu.

Fox keyed his com.

"Alright Slippy, we're clear. Give me a sit rep."

"They're gaining ground," Slippy's voice crackled. "But they've stopped firing at me, so I'm putting everything into the engines; as long as those fighters don't cause any problems, I should be able to reach the debris field in time, th-though just barely. Still no response to com hails."

"They must've stopped firing now that their own fighters are in the way," Miyu mused aloud.

"Copy that," Fox replied, nudging his joystick and bringing the Arwing around the side of the _Great Fox_. His wingmates formed on either side of him in a triangle formation as the larger ship passed by. Soon the glow of its engines left his peripheral, and they were alone. "We'll hold off the fighters and tangle up the frigate as long as we can."

Falco's com window cut off Slippy's response.

"Whoa, what? Have you lost it, Fox?" he practically yelped. "Going up against a corvette or two with fighters is one thing, but you're talking about a step down from a friggin' _capital ship_!"

"I don't think that's a good idea, Fox," Miyu agreed, with a bit more rational than the avian. "Now that I'm staring this sucker in the face I'm not so sure of it either. If I know my weight classes correctly, that thing could smoke the _Great Fox _if it gets the drop."

"Which it has."

"Settle down guys," Fox ordered, "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Chances are they're just scaring us and will try to take us alive anyway, which should buy us some time. But if it comes to violence, and stalling the frigate means Slippy can get away, I'm going to take that chance. Besides, this patrol group's got some horrible fleet discipline. Those corvettes look like they're leaving the _Slingshot _behind."

As the trio of Arwings angled a little to put them on an intercept course with the unit of fighters headed their way, the mercenary pilots could clearly see, both on their instruments and out their cockpits, the engines of the four corvettes flaring to life. The Cornerian patrol was now split geographically into three distinct groups: the contingent of fighters streaking ahead, the frigate lagging behind, and the corvettes bridging the gap. All with the _Great Fox _firmly spitted in their sights.

"Copy that," Falco agreed, his voice of dissent lightening a bit. "Alright, I'll trust you, oh fearless leader. Just don't start ramming people again."

A beat passed.

"... Er, apologies to present company."

Miyu blinked. "An apology from Falco Lombardi? Just how early in the morning is it?"

"Far, far too early."

Fox laughed.

The Arwings neared the oncoming Cornerian fighters with speed on their side, though the green striped Cornerians had numbers on theirs. Four engine trails burned angrily back at the mercenaries as Fox flicked off the safety on his joystick, noting with satisfaction the digital heat gauges for each of his fighter's cannons appearing on his HUD. Immediately after, targeting boxes began drawing themselves on the clear material of his cockpit, projectors filling his view with just enough information.

Fox keyed his com, setting the broadcast spectrum from the private channel his wingmates shared to the public spectrum.

"Cornerian Patrol, this is Daniel Reynard," the vulpine spoke, using the fake name he had taken to using in public since the issuing of his bounty. "As a citizen of Corneria, I demand to know why you've taken hostile measures towards me and my crew."

Silence reigned over the communications channel as the distance indicator of the CDF fighters rapidly dropped.

"I repeat, I demand to know why we are being targeted for aggressive action. …It is our civil right to defend ourselves."

The com crackled.

"Don't insult my intelligence, _Daniel Reynard_," a picture-less voice boomed. "That is no more your name than Venom is a tropical goddamned re-sort. You and your crew will soon be as dust to my boot."

Fox paused. "Well then, may I know the man I can thank for our approaching boot-dustification?"

The voice snorted. "My name is Captain Parth of the Cornerian 7th Fleet. Give your _Lord _O'Donnell my regards."

Fox had to pause again. "_What_?" he mouthed silently, deactivating the public com.

"The hell did he just say?" Falco's gold-bordered portrait asked.

"_O'Donnell_?" Miyu asked. "You don't think he means-"

Before the lynx could finish her sentence, her targeting computer rang out a proximity alarm, and the battle was joined.

With the CDF fighters boosting at full speed to catch up to the _Great Fox_, little effective fire could be rendered by either side. Lasers sprang forth to fill the space between them, but little more than shields were grazed as the two lines threaded through each other.

Fox yanked back on the stick and flipped his Arwing into a vertical U-turn, all the while keeping an eye on his radar. The red dots were circling back towards them. He breathed a small sigh. They weren't pursuing the _Great Fox._

"Alright, we caught 'em," he said, "Weapons free. Remember, they're trying to kill us. We _cannot _hold back." A lump was rising somewhere in the back of his mind, but he mentally beat it down before it could rupture doubt and uncertainty into his thoughts. There was time for considering the ramifications of his actions later. Adrenaline was kicking in.

The CDF pilots were quick, but the mercenaries were faster coming out of the turn. Fox spitted an unlucky pilot in his crosshairs, instinctively pulling the trigger before the targeting lights even flashed. Florescent beams of energy leapt forth and tagged the thin ship, rendering its shields visible as they absorbed the damage.

Unfortunately for the Cornerian, Miyu's Arwing also found his ship coming out of the turn. The concentrated fire from the two mercenaries decimated the shielding of his older fighter, bringing it down before he could streak past them. Miyu was already too close to aim by the time he lost his defenses and had to peel away, but Fox had just enough time to line up a final split second shot. A pair of lasers lanced out, and then they were past each other again like the jousting warriors of old.

However, where Fox quickly threw his ship into a barrel roll to throw off the targeting of another CDF fighter, the first Cornerian lolled his ship upwards, slowly climbing and heading in no general direction at all. Closer inspection would've revealed a gaping, melted hole in the cockpit canopy. There was no explosion. But the numbers were suddenly even.

Miyu sucked in breath as her crosshairs flickered over the engine glow of a target. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a voice questioned what she was doing, lining up a shot on a Cornerian fighter. Even in her smuggling days, she would never have thought of outright attacking a CDF military ship. For all but the haughtiest of outlaws, a showdown with Lylat's highest law was widely accepted to be tantamount to a flashy form of suicide. Local deputies and minor planetary militia were one thing. But Cornerians…they stuck around. They pursued long after the initial fight was over.

Miyu's shots bounded off her target's shields, draining power but doing no physical damage. As she triggered another burst of energy, the right side of her cockpit suddenly contacted her temple as a series of blasts rocked her Arwing. Remembering what Fox and Falco had mentioned about evasive maneuvers, the lynx goosed the thrusters and yanked back hard on the joystick, sending her fighter into a tight loop.

As she did, she caught the green and white blur of her assailant tear by over her head, perpendicular to her previous path.

"I'm on it," Fox called over the com, followed moments later by the dot of his Arwing on Miyu's radar soaring past her position, picking up her attacker's trail.

Miyu gritted her teeth and found her old target, lining up another flurry of shots. The fact that they had been attacked by the Cornerians without warning or identification took a good deal of the guilt off her heart, allowing her to push it to the back of her mind for the time being. The rest could be dealt with shortly.

The faint, wispy glow of the CDF fighter's shields finally faded away, exposing it to the full fury of the lynx's firepower. Just as she was about to deliver the final blow to its weakly armored engine block, the cockpit suddenly flared bright, and separated from the rest of the ship.

"Good choice buddy," Miyu said softly, watching the ejected pilot drift away for a split second before banking away from the directionless fighter to find another target.

An explosion flashed in her peripheral, followed shortly by a call across the com.

"Scratch one more," Falco's voice resounded triumphantly, a smirk of victory plastered across his face on his wingmates HUDs.

"Slippy, what's our status?" Fox asked, whittling down the defenses of the final remaining CDF fighter.

"Almost there," the toad replied, "Just about to b-breach the perimeter now."

"Gotcha. We're almost done here; meet you in the field."

"Thank god," Falco said, "Going after those corvettes would be suicide, and _you_ know it."

The final fighter stood little chance against the trio of Arwings, and quickly fell into retreat under their combined firepower. Fox decided against pursuit, satisfied with the blunted nose they had dealt the Cornerians. They looped around and began their short trek back towards the _Great Fox_, now partially obscured by a screen of junk and twisted metal. Behind them, the larger ships of the Cornerian patrol were still gaining ground. He tapped one of the red icons on his screen, bracketing it and bringing up a digital information display.

The corvette was a squat, rectangular vessel, longer than it was wide with a slanted nose. Like most in its class, it was three or four times larger than a fighter, and bristled with anti-fighter turrets, though a pair of heavy cannons strapped under its cockpit gave it enough punch to cause worry to the _Great Fox _if it or one of its companions got too close. Fox tapped each of the other icons in turn, satisfying his curiosity that they were all of the same model.

Fox sighed; Falco was right. They had done everything they could logically do to stall the Cornerians' advance. There was no way any of them would survive a frontal assault on the staggered wave of corvettes. The rest was up to chance and Slippy's ability to hide a several hundred-ton light carrier.

By the time the trio of Arwings pulled even with the _Great Fox_, the larger ship was carving a swath through the errantly floating pieces of scrap of the debris field. The mercenaries made sure to keep a buffer distance from their home ship, ensuring they weren't accidently crushed when the vessel tilted or rolled to avoid the larger scraps of metal. Checking his readout, Fox could see that Slippy had taken the _Great Fox_'s shields offline to run the engines at max; even the main cannons were left uncharged. It was the only reason the Cornerian corvettes were having difficulty gaining ground.

Miyu couldn't help but glance around the field as she kept in formation behind Fox's wing. The hunks of scrap were too far gone to give any clue of how they came to arrive at that particular spot just outside Meteos. Any hint of color or identification had been burned away by whatever unfortunate incident led to the ship's demise.

"_Or ships_," Miyu thought, floating her Arwing up a few meters to spare her beaten shields the effort of absorbing another blow from debris. She keyed her com. "Looks like there's enough scrap out here to fit a full scale battle."

Falco hummed an agreement. "Must've been recent too; that reactor cloud looks fresh."

Miyu looked ahead. The _Great Fox _was moving headlong towards the dense cloud of gas in the center of the debris field, tongues of the vapor swirling with strange undercurrents. The final death throes of a larger vessel were always marvels of destruction and unrestrained power, but a few lead to strange occurrences in the aftermath.

One such occurrence was 'reactor clouding', as it came to be known. When a ship, typically a military vessel or other possessor of a high-output reactor, was destroyed, automatic failsafe algorithms typically shut down the reactor if it was still live, to prevent the explosion resulting from an unmonitored overload from vaporizing any escape pods that may have been launched in time. Obviously, this procedure failed when the reactor itself was the final target of enemy gunners, with the resulting titanic explosion rendering a debris field of any significant size highly unlikely.

However, if a reactor failed to detonate upon being destroyed, it often resulted in the core shunting its dense, inert fuel into open space. No major explosion occurred to blast away the debris field around the deceased ship, and the leaked fuel formed an opaque cloud of gas that completely shrouded the core of the wreck. An amount of radiation prevented unshielded ships from cleaning up or shutting down the reactor, and most who encountered such a 'reactor cloud' simply chose to let it stand, giving it a wide berth as they went by.

Judging by the size of the cloud the _Great Fox _was rapidly approaching, the unfortunate ship had to have been at least a capital-weight vessel, if not higher.

"I've got a bad feeling about this," Miyu mused as the grey gas slowly filled the view from her cockpit.

"Me too," Fox agreed, "But I've got a worse feeling about those corvettes."

Miyu glanced at her radar just in time to miss the view of a debris chunk explode just off her Arwing's left side. She yelped in surprise.

"Shit!" Falco called out, another heavy projectile whizzing by his canopy. "There's no way the corvettes are in range yet."

"They're just taking potshots," Fox tried to reassure him, stopping when another flash caught his attention.

Glancing out his cockpit, the vulpine saw with a sinking heart the leftmost of the _Great Fox_'s three main thrusters sputter and die. While the other two glowed an angry orange as they burned at unsafe power, the third faded to a cold black.

"Hold on Slip, we're almost there," Fox called, gritting his teeth. Part of him wanted to loop around and charge at the Cornerians head on, to do something to give his friend more breathing room, but he knew it would do no good.

The nose of the _Great Fox _dipped into the grey cloud, particles parting to let it slip inside. Around the perimeter of the disappearing vessel, Fox could spot several small pockmarks appearing in the smoke, tiny craters in the gas caused by the errant shots of the pursuing corvettes.

And then, before he knew it, space disappeared into a shroud of grey.

* * *

Alarms sprang to life, assaulting the vulpine with a dizzying array of warnings and imminent failure notices. His shield strength meter began to plummet, and his power readouts fluctuated wildly. The com system was dead. Though in near pristine state moments ago, his Arwing suddenly wouldn't be able to survive much longer.

Out of the endless wall of gas, he could barely make out the faint glow of the_ Great Fox_'s engines. Hoping Slippy knew what to do, he banked towards his home ship and hit the boosters. His radar was useless, but Falco and Miyu had been right behind him when he entered. If he could see the _Great Fox's _large thrusters from a relatively short ways away, he reasoned they could probably see his Arwing's much smaller engines from even closer.

Almost immediately, a large shadow of black appeared connected to the glowing engines in the grey, quickly resolving itself into a familiar silhouette. Suddenly, the cloud around him burst into light, almost blinding the vulpine as the _Great Fox_'s external flood lights activated.

A beacon of illumination, Fox found his way to the _Great Fox _and nestled his Arwing tightly on its left side, near where the pair of giant wings met the main body of the vessel. After programming his autopilot to maintain his position relative to the carrier, he surveyed his instruments, noting with a grim expression of satisfaction that the number of warnings had abruptly and drastically decreased. His shield gauge began slowly recharging, and his radar showed a tiny bubble of clear signal, extending mere meters beyond the tips of the carrier's wings.

Just as suddenly as he had entered the clear zone, so too did he find himself joined by the other Arwings, popping into existence on his radar as though they had spontaneously appeared out of the ether. Which, in all fairness, they had, at least according to his instruments.

"…Anyone hear me?" Miyu's voice cried to life, her portrait appearing nearly without hiccup on Fox's HUD. Her face was barely composed, the desperate signs of panic beginning to sneak their way in. Her eyes betrayed her utter fear at the idea of dying alone in a failing ship.

"Don't worry, we got you," Fox replied, smiling as much as he could given the circumstances. He managed to maintain his composure, even after noticing on his radar that her shields had been on the verge of failing completely.

Miyu's face immediately brightened, and she breathed a sigh of relief. "Oh thank Sol." Her eyes quickly faded from gratefulness to accusation as she piloted her Arwing close enough to Fox's to see his face clearly through their cockpits. "What the hell just happened? Damn near lost it all right there."

"The Arwing's shields are too weak to handle the reactor cloud," Fox explained. "Radiation punches right through 'em. If you'd have stayed out there after they went down, you'd be drifting dead in the water in no time."

"Arwing would be fine though," Falco added. "So you'd be good there."

"You fellas like to cut it close, doncha?" Jason's voice called from the _Great Fox_, his picture opening on the pilots' HUDs. He was sitting in Slippy's previous seat at the helm of the ship, looking a little unsure of what had just happened.

"Standard operating procedure," Falco quipped, smiling with relief but not emotionally untouched by the closeness of his brush with the reactor cloud surrounding them. "Where's Slip?"

"He mentioned something about the main guns shorting out when power was shunted to them from the engines," Jason replied, scratching his head. "Katt and him just took off below decks to check it out. Told me to keep a steady course and watch the autopilot."

"Well at least the old girl's shields are working," Falco breathed.

"Yeah, about that," Miyu asked slowly, "Why aren't we dying? I thought you said the Arwing's shields were too weak."

"They are," Fox answered, noting on his radar that Falco had pulled up behind him and Miyu. "But the_ Fox_ has shields to spare. Remember those modifications I was talking about back on the bridge? One of them that Slippy cooked up during the Lylat War was a radiation barrier. As long as we stay inside the _Great Fox_'s shield radius, it'll keep the soup out. Check out your radar."

Miyu did as instructed and noticed the tiny bubble of clarity that appeared in the middle of the display, centered around the clump of icons that represented the Arwings and _Great Fox_. A mobile oasis in the torrent of radiation and interference of the reactor cloud.

"Huh," she hummed in interest.

"So now, what's to prevent our friends from following us in here?" Jason asked. "The cloud ain't _that _big. They'd find us eventually."

"I'd be very surprised if those corvettes have the shielding to stand up to this sort of punishment," Fox thought aloud in response. "In fact, I'd bet against that frigate having it either. No, I'm sure they're just setting up a nice little parameter outside right now, making sure we don't find a way to sneak out."

"Oh," Jason said, trailing off and staring into the distance for a moment. "Well that's comforting. Um, forgive me for possibly missing something here, but why don't we just keep going on through, before they circle us in?"

Fox sighed. "Well, for starters, the _Great Fox _is operating on two thirds thrust right now. We were barely outrunning those guys before, so there's no way in hell we're gonna make it this time. The main guns are shot, no pun intended, and even if Katt and Slippy work some sort of miracle, there's no way we'd last in a standing fight against _that _many ships. Maybe the frigate, if it were unescorted. And we got the drop."

"So all that," Falco added, "_Plus_, somewhere in the chop out there is a leaky reactor, and we're a-swimming in the fuel. All it takes is a bump and that thing'll go up in the most beautiful explosion you'll ever see for the rest of your life. Why do you think they stopped firing at us."

"Alright, alright, jeez," Jason chided, "We'll sit tight. Wasn't my decision to make anywho."

"Damn straight," Falco muttered.

"Easy, Falco," Fox warned, "Just…let me think for a second. We'll find a way outta this."

The com fell quiet as silence reigned in the cloud, interrupted every so often by the eerie echoing creak of some hollow sound, carried by the densely packed particles. The sound was reminiscent of the deep-diving marine animals of Corneria, terrifyingly large in size. Their songs were famous for their distinct, solemn feel, and deep, bass roots in the frequency spectrum. However, while in the ocean the sounds were organic in origin, in the reactor cloud they were clearly metallic, originating from the collision of chunks of debris.

The idea that at any given collision, one of those chunks could be the very reactor that created the cloud was particularly disturbing for the mercenary leader, and kept nibbling away at his thoughts.

Even at full combat capacity, which it decidedly wasn't, the _Great Fox _wouldn't be able to stand up to onslaught of four corvettes and a frigate. Even picking one or two off in the initial emergence from the cloud, there was no way it would survive the ensuing battle without fighter support. And with the corvettes still present, the Arwings would be torn to shreds. So combat seemed out of the question.

Meanwhile, the idea of running was equally dismal in Fox's mind. Operating on only two-thirds power, any hope of outrunning the corvettes was up in the grey smoke that surrounded him. And as was obviously the case, the armament of the corvettes was enough to damage the carrier, even if it was just a lucky shot. Keeping the shields up would sacrifice engine power, allowing the frigate to come into play as an enemy combatant.

As any veteran of combat would profess, every strategy in war comes down to one of two ideas: fight, or flight. But in this case, Fox was beginning to feel a sense of hopelessness about the situation. They couldn't just stay in the cloud; reinforcements were probably already on their way, and the _Great Fox_'s shields wouldn't hold out forever. A decision had to be made.

"_This…can't be right. How did they even find us? Why didn't Slippy catch them sneaking up on us? If only he'd…" _Fox thought, passing a hand over his face and rubbing his temples. Blaming people wasn't going to fix anything at this point. _"We've always managed to find a way out of things but this time…this time I don't know. I just don't think I can make a decision."_

It was fortunate then, at that moment of despair, that he didn't have to.

"Um, guys?" Miyu croaked, her voice cracking. "I don't think we're alone in here."

"What?" Falco asked. "What do you mean?"

"Look."

"What are you-Whoa!" the avian cried in surprise.

Fox looked up and jumped in his flight harness. Just in front of him, towards the nose of the _Great Fox_, sat a black fighter, not fifty meters away. He thought hard, but couldn't remember seeing it approaching, and his radar was certainly no help.

It had just appeared there.

Fox's hands immediately dropped to the controls of his Arwing, and almost before he gave it any input, his targeting system sprang to life. A wireframe image appeared on his HUD, as well as a pair of brackets around the newcomer to the _Great Fox_'s protective bubble. Any lingering thoughts about its apparently supernatural appearance disappeared as a shield appraisal came back as almost drained. It was mortal. It had braved the reactor cloud too.

Fox squinted at the fighter. It was completely powered down. No engine glow or apparent weapons systems gave themselves away. The pitch black paint job gave it further appearance as just a shadow in three dimensions, imprinted somehow against the vapor wall that marked the edges of the _Great Fox_'s shields.

He keyed a private channel to Jason.

"Jason," he said, more quietly than was necessary, "Give me an uplink into the _Great Fox_'s sensor system. Let me get a look at this guy."

Jason paused for a second, his eyes wandering the unfamiliar console in front of him before he spotted the necessary controls. "Got it." His hands swiped across the portrait as he operated the interface, allowing Fox's Arwing access to the carrier's more powerful sensor suite.

And all the while, the dark fighter just sat there.

"What's it doing?" Miyu thought out loud, having the presence of mind to join in the private channel first.

"I don't know," Falco admitted, apparently trying to will the ship into clarity according to the squinted expression his portrait depicted. "But it's givin' me the creeps."

Fox poured over the additional sensor data. The fighter was actually surprisingly similar to his in regards to construction, though its wings had been swept forward and up rather than backward and level. The tips came up to about even with the cockpit - made of a tinted material - which itself sat in the middle of the main fuselage. It was a fairly standard layout for a fighter, though Fox couldn't shake the feeling that there was something distinctly _familiar _about it.

And those wings…

Fox was teetering on the edge of realization, and Falco's voice was enough to push him over.

"Hey Fox," he said unusually tentatively, "You know what that sorta reminds me of?"

"O'Donnell," the vulpine said with quiet certainty. "That's the top half of a Wolfen."

"_What?"_ Jason exclaimed.

"Oh god," Miyu whispered, loud enough to get picked up by the com.

Falco just stammered with a bit of a laugh, unable to do anything else. "Ho-h-holy shit."

Fox keyed the public frequency. "O'Donnell…is that you?" The vulpine's heart skipped a beat when a new portrait appeared on his HUD.

It showed the inside of a cockpit shrouded in darkness, as if the pilot had turned off every instrument light. Only the illumination cast off by the _Great Fox_'s flood lights shed a faint glow on the pilot. His jumpsuit was black with red trim, sporting the emblem of a sharp, red silhouette of a canine's paw on his shoulder. A goggled flight helmet with a similar coloring and emblem prevented any form of identification from the muzzle on up, but the canine's snout was decidedly lupine in species. What fur was visible was grey with streaks of white.

The pilot was grinning.

"Not quite," he said cryptically before cutting the transmission.

As the Star Fox mercenaries looked on in bewilderment, the black fighter's engines burned to life, and the pilot executed a quick somersault, utterly disappearing into the grey shroud. Suddenly, the mercenaries forgot all about the Cornerians waiting on their doorstep.

Before Fox could even register what had just happened, his proximity warning shrieked with anger. But he paid no attention. He didn't even have to look down at his instruments to find out what the issue was. It was all unfolding before his very eyes.

At first, it appeared as though Sol itself had abruptly taken up residence in the reactor cloud, as light poured from every direction. Putting the _Great Fox's _flood lights to shame, the cloud was suddenly translucent, at least for a distance. Fox nudged his Arwing out from under the carrier's wing to get a better look at the source of the light, shielding his eyes with his hands as the illumination rained down from above. It was impossible to see anything, and the cries of surprise from his wingmates faded into the background. It was total sensory overload.

Slowly though, the omnipresent light began to resolve itself, and a shadow appeared at the center of it. The Arwing's delayed autodimmers assisted, and soon, Fox felt like he was watching an angel ascend, struck speechless by the massive construction of engineering and technology that hovered above him, larger than and nearly dwarfing the _Great Fox_. His mouth fell agape.

The ship was long and rectangular in shape, though with the streamlined edges that made it beautifully efficient in atmosphere. The top of the nose jutted out a bit further than the bottom, with a large notch cut into it halfway down. It came to a point in the front, but was wide enough just before it for the notch to hide something within its shadow. The body grew in girth slightly until about halfway back, where it tapered its horizontal growth at the same point where a pair of large wings, thick enough for a deck or two to fit, sprouted out.

The wings never detached from the main hull at any point, extending backwards at an angle for only a small while before straightening and heading towards the stern of the vessel. The end result was roughly a tripling of the ship's width from the halfway point on back – thick in the middle, flat on either side. From his point of view, Fox could easily make out a pair of large hanger bays slung under each 'wing', accompanied by a pair of very large cannons placed above, close to the main fuselage. A sleek dorsal wing completed the vessel, tapering off a little after the body of the craft came to end, so that it hung over the engine block by a good amount.

It was painted just like the mysterious fighter: solid black, though with red outlines. Plastered large on the dorsal fin was the same, battle-worn emblem as on the pilot's jumpsuit: a blood red wolf's paw. Fox's viewing angle permitted him to just barely make out the deep crimson letters painted underneath the ship, though as he did, he couldn't quite believe what he saw.

LONE WOLF

"This…there's…no way," Falco's voice stammered from some place far away. He wasn't laughing anymore.

"Do we run?" Miyu asked, unable to take her eyes off of the sight above her. "Fox, do we run?"

Once again, another portrait opened across their HUDs. However, when this one resolved itself, it was not the inside of the fighter's cockpit, but instead the commander's seat of a warship's bridge. A chair sat in the middle of the shot, and in the chair, sat a ghost from another life.

Fox froze as the ghost leaned forward, his one yellow eye matching the amused smile spread across his scarred muzzle. An eyepatch hid the other. He braced an arm on one knee, letting the other hand fall loosely in his lap.

"Run? Oh, well now…I'm afraid I can't let you do _that_, Fox McCloud," said Wolf O'Donnell.

* * *

**A/N:**

Happy New Year! Hope everyone had some enjoyable holidays.

**chaos Leader: **You have some interesting ideas about Linka there, friend...that's all I'm going to say about that :) And don't worry, if you'll bare with me just one more time, I'll put in what I know the story's been lacking very soon. Thanks for the review!

**The Broken Wolf: **Yeah, sorry about the delay. I know that must sound hollow at this point given my average update time, but I mean it.

**Wanderling: **Hey, welcome to the story! Thanks for the kind review :)

As always, reviews are nice. But don't feel forced to jot something down. At all. Don't at all feel like you're being subtly coerced into clicking that review button, leaving some positive or negative critiques, and then pressing submit. Don't. Because I'm um...totally not trying to do that. Subtly tell you. To leave reviews. By clicking the review button. And typing some words. ...Because I'm not. That, heh, that would just be silly.

Seriously though, all reviews are greatly appreciated, especially those that tell me where I can improve.

Thanks for reading!

-Irish Redd

P.S. And thanks for over 7000 views!


	27. Chapter 27: Warlord O'Donnell

**XXVII: **Warlord O'Donnell

_Darkness. Inky, endless, darkness._

_Though for darkness, there must be light; there is no shadow without the sun, nor brightness without the shade. When either is absent, the other loses its meaning, and becomes only nothingness._

_He could vaguely feel something wet around his both of his arms; something wet and penetrating. His eyes either refused to open, or refused to close. There was no way of knowing. _

_When one's eyes are open, there is usually some small outline, or some faint ghost of an image as the mind struggles to cope with lack of input. When one's eyes are closed, tiny blobs of color tend to shuffle in and out of view, like a rainbow of dancers in a darkened room._

_But this…this was truly nothingness._

_He remembered hearing himself thinking thoughts of reassurance, of sanity. But he long ago dismissed them as other than his own._

_The last thing he could remember was falling asleep in a cell, like so many nights before._

_Suddenly, he wasn't sure he would ever wake up. _

_Perhaps this was death, he reasoned, his own thoughts echoing as though shouted into a canyon. Perhaps this was what it felt like to lose one's corporal form._

_As he thought this, there was the gnawing of fear and regret he assumed was the usual case, but one thought abruptly took hold over the others._

_It was a thought that had been born out of what he was told before falling asleep, so woefully optimistic about waking up in the morning. What his torturers had told him, what they implied…it was madness. Insanity in its purest and simplest form. Natural minds were not meant to know of such things; natural hands were not supposed to create them.  
_

_Fox…don't come for me._

_

* * *

_

Beta Rhade watched the trio of blue and white Arwings glide between him and the rest of his flight, boxing them on four corners. Their escort mission was a simple run from the mercenary ship to the _Lone Wolf_, but Lord O'Donnell had given him and his men explicit orders to stay alert. They were unnecessary orders, Rhade assured his superior, as his flight was always on full alert. But the fact that O'Donnell had said it leant the pilots in the Arwings a bit of respect they wouldn't have otherwise received from the lupine lieutenant.

His grey and white-streaked muzzle remained pressed into a thin line as the seven ship procession neared one of the _Lone Wolf_'s massive landing bays. The size of a full-fledged military carrier, but with the direct combat strength of a destroyer, the wolf's home ship was a sight to behold. He never let it show, but every time he steered his fighter in for landing, a little memory of his mother opening her arms to him as a pup snuck into his mind. Rhade knew most fighter pilots felt that way about their home ship, but to him, the _Lone Wolf_ was something special.

Rhade shook his wandering mind back to reality as the flight of fighters leveled out and slowed for their approach. The combined flood lights of the _Lone Wolf_ and the mercenaries' smaller carrier had made navigating the short distance of thick reactor cloud vapors relatively easy. Besides, Rhade knew what the mercenary pilots no doubt knew as well. Any attempt at hostility would be suicide. The Cornerians had beaten the _Lone Wolf_ down, but it was by no means out of the fight. The ship and its combined assets would carve the mercenaries into dust before they even knew what hit them.

So it was less intimidation and more a desire to not die that kept his charges from doing anything sneaky as their fighters touched down on the deck. And Rhade was alright with that.

The landing sequence went smoothly enough, and before Rhade knew it, he and the three pilots of his command were dismounting from their own fighters. Normally he would insist on doing his own post-flight checks, but for once he allowed his subordinates to handle the process for him. "A Beta's work was never done," was the common saying, being the middling officer of Lord O'Donnell's fleet, and his escort responsibility extended to guiding the Warlord's guests to the bridge.

The wolf doffed his helmet and set it purposefully on the console of his fighter before hopping out and descending the cockpit ladder. He noticed with a small smirk that all four of the black fighters were lined up in near perfect formation in a line in the back of the hanger, just before the equal flights of bombers and Wolfen Mk I's, from which his own ride had been derived. All twelve fighters were sleek in their black and red paint jobs, marred only by the handsome scars of battle. It was a beautiful example of order which sadly represented the remaining sum of Lord O'Donnell's fighter force; one mere squadron.

In contrast, the blue and white Arwings were arrayed in a loose triangle, facing towards the exit. They were still toward the rear of the hanger though, leaving a large expanse of open deckspace between them and the magnetic barrier keeping the vacuum out, plenty of room for another full squadron of fighters, at least.

Rhade approached the pilots with a firm stride, making sure they were watching him before innocently checking the pistol at his hip. The slide snapped into place with a pleasant retort, and he holstered the weapon. Of the three mercenaries, he saw the middle, taller one, the avian, smile a bit at this gesture.

"Well that was totally necessary," the bird said as Rhade came to a stop before them. "Oh, I'm completely indifferent to the ridiculously sized cannons out front aimed at our home, but now that I see you've got a pistol, I'll cooperate."

Rhade returned the smile with a curt smirk; he had already sized the pilot up before he got two words out. Reaction and knowledge, but no intellect. Probably a very capable pilot, but certainly not the leader. The muscle, rather.

The Beta turned to the girl next, who looked back at him with serious eyes and crossed arms. It looked like she was largely indifferent to the massive display of engineering around her. But there was something else behind those blue irises, the way they wavered. She blinked. She was afraid. Strong enough not to show it to those who weren't looking, but certainly intimidated. Lord O'Donnell had mentioned that he was 'old friends' with these pilots, and to treat them accordingly. Rhade interpreted that as the Warlord's way of saying, 'don't treat them with outward hostility.'

Both the male mercenaries seemed to support this statement, showing a level of ease given their surroundings and O'Donnell's reputation. But by Rhade's guess, the Lord's hint that he knew them didn't apply to her. She was a new recruit.

Which left the fox.

The vulpine's expression was calm, though his eyes were alert and focused. Rhade noticed him taking in details as the wolf approached the mercenaries moments ago. Spotting where the doors were, where potential cover was, who the Beta himself was. All this while nothing overtly hostile had been done to suggest that he was in danger.

Here he was. This was their leader.

"Mr. McCloud, I presume?" Rhade said, nodding towards the fox. When he got a nod in return, he continued. "Lord O'Donnell was requested that you meet him on the bridge. I am Beta Rhade. My men and I will escort you."

"Pshh," Falco barely suppressed a laugh. He quipped to Miyu under his breath, "Sounds like a sports drink."

Fox nodded, ignoring his friend and pulling his handgun out of the holster on his hip. He flipped it around, offering the handle to the Beta.

Rhade put up a hand. If he heard Falco's remark, he pretended not to. "No need Mr. McCloud. I have orders to leave you with your firearms. You are not prisoners of Lord O'Donnell; merely guests. Please, follow me."

Fox stared at the officer for a moment before shrugging and holstering his weapon. "Of course," he said, "Lead on."

The Beta nodded, a small bow of politeness, before turning on his heel and walking in the direction of the nearest doorway. Fox set off after him at a comfortable distance, noticing as he did that a squad of marines had found their way into the hanger while he was exchanging his brief pleasentries with Rhade. Their uniforms were identical in color to Rhade's, though they sported several protective ballistics plates and heavier weapons. As he and his team followed the Beta into the corridors of the _Lone Wolf_, Fox watched the security detail smoothly envelope them, taking up flanking positions on both sides of the mercenaries.

Fox observed their eyes. There was no hostility in them. Only duty, tinged with fatigue. The vulpine had to admit that he was still in a little shock at Wolf O'Donnell's sudden appearance, but knowing that the Warlord wasn't being outwardly aggressive was a small comfort.

"_Although in all fairness, it could just be a trap," _Fox thought as Rhade led them down a few intersections in the hallways to an elevator. _"I don't know Wolf well enough to know if he holds grudges."_

The lift was large enough to hold the entire procession, marine squad and all, though it was a tight fit. Rhade tapped a key towards the top of a series of floor indicators, and the elevator began its ascent to the _Lone Wolf_'s bridge.

The floors passed by with no sound other than the quiet hum of distant machinery and the occasional clicking of equipment shifting as the marines adjusted their stances. It gave Fox a brief chance to wonder what exactly Wolf O'Donnell was calling him and his crew for. It was one thing to meet another ship in the same reactor cloud, and another thing to actually be acquainted with the commander of said ship; but what could possibly be the purpose of a personal audience? A quiet voice in the back of his mind droned on and on about it being a trap, a snare for a revenge-minded old foe. And Fox had to admit, it was getting harder and harder to discount the idea.

The lift arrived at its destination without notice, and the doors parted to reveal a small room. The party stepped out of the elevator and into the tiny space, filling it with their number. Fox quickly noticed there were only two ways in; the elevator they had just taken, and a large, heavy door opposite, flanked by a pair of marines in substantially heavier armor than those escorting the mercenaries.

Rhade stepped forward, looking at one of the guards without word. The guard in turn stared back for a moment before nodding his fully enclosed helmet in a quick beat of acknowledgment. He rapped the back of his armored glove on the heavy door once, the metallic _thunk_ resounding through the small room. A moment later, the door's locking mechanism audibly lifted, and the two slabs of metal parted to reveal the nerve center of the _Lone Wolf._

It was a flat, elliptical room with curved walls covered by screens and projectors, displaying all the sorts of information that keep a large, military vessel running. The bridge was decidedly lacking in personnel, with the newly arrived party and escorts more than doubling the total previous population, but it didn't make that room seem any less bustling. The few officers present crisscrossed the space, checking various subsystems and consoles with data chips in hand. If they noticed the new arrivals, it was only as a point of curiosity as they went about their hurried yet calm routines.

At one end of the bridge, silently watching from a command chair, was none other than Wolf O'Donnell.

Fox locked eyes with him almost immediately. There was no dramatic swivel of Wolf's seat, no theatrical welcome or unsubtle attempt at playing himself up to be the king of his own personal empire as the mercenary captain half-expected. The lupine was certainly deserving of such a grandiose act, given that the last time Fox saw him, he was in command of merely a flight of fighters no bigger than Fox's own. Now he was a Warlord, and enough of a threat to put him on the Cornerian High Command's hit list, last Fox heard. But Wolf gave no indication of such heraldry. In fact, he barely gave any indication that he was staring at the mercenaries, and not some exhibit of fine art.

Wolf certainly didn't look the part of a king, in any case. His dress seemed entirely without the pomp and ceremony of most commanders and warlords. A heavy black duster sat unfastened surrounding a matching set of black and grey combat fatigues, although the eyes were drawn to the color of a red undershirt poking up around his neck . The urban camouflaged trousers ran into a pair of worn, dark, steel-toed combat boots, laced high with grey string. Largely hidden by his sitting position, but still noticeable to Fox's trained eyes, was a pistol belt looped around his waist.

The lavender eye not hidden by the black eyepatch studied the mercenaries like a professor figuring a problem. His bare hands rested easily on the arm rests of his chair. Seconds passed by like hours, and even as the bridge officers worked and the marines shifted on their feet, Fox and Wolf never moved.

Finally, Wolf stood. Drawing himself to his full height, the tails of his duster fell into place around him, coming to a halt around his knees. Risking to be the first to break the stare, Fox quickly glanced at his belt. It was lying evenly. Which meant there was an even weight on each side. Which meant Wolf was carrying two pistols.

Fox rejoined the Warlord's gaze. Despite being ten meters away and not much taller than the vulpine, Fox still couldn't help like feeling Wolf was staring down at him somehow.

Finally, the silence was broken.

"What are you doing here, Fox?" Wolf said as he crossed his arms, more a statement than a question. His voice was a deep, gravelly growl, suggesting a hard-bitten life not quite fully lived out. It seemed eerily out of place for one not more than a decade older than the mercenary.

"I was actually wondering the same question," Fox replied evenly, realizing for the first time that his hand had subconsciously inched towards his pistol, close enough for his fingertips to brush the grip. The low position of his holster on his hip prevented the motion from looking out of place, but it would've been foolish to assume Wolf wasn't aware of it.

"You needn't worry, pup," Wolf offered, confirming Fox's reasoning and pausing to wave away Rhade's advance with a flick of his paw. Both wolves had noticed. "I don't plan on harming you or your men today."

"You'll excuse me if I find that hard to believe," Fox said, not moving his hand.

Wolf raised his shoulders in only the slightest shrug. "Suit yourself. But you have nothing to fear from me."

"You think we've _forgotten. _Is that it?" Falco asked, his own hand lowering to the revolver on his hip. "And now you brought us here, out of the cockpit to kill us because you couldn't kill us in-"

"Do not think me blind, bird," Wolf interjected, turning towards Falco as his voice gained a more active edge. "Or stupid. Or slow. I know that you think I hold a grudge against you for what happened during the Lylat War. And given my wingmen at the time, I cannot fault you for that. But I had no quarrel with you then and I've no quarrel with you now. A job was a job. Do not test my patience on that matter."

Falco's hand was resolute, hovering just above the handle to his weapon as the room settled from Wolf's commanding voice. But Fox relaxed his paw, crossing his arms to match the lupine's. A silence passed before Wolf spoke again, turning back to Fox.

"Dengar and that ape were replacements, given to me by Andross when two of my original wingmen fell to Cornerian Angels early on in my contract. They were good men. The replacements were not. Had I any idea who they actually were, I would have spaced them the first chance I got."

"Out of the kindness of your heart?" Falco asked sarcastically.

"Out of the soundness of their _minds_," Wolf retorted. "Oikonny's relationship to Andross clouded his piloting ability, which was dismal to begin with. And Pigma…Pigma had some vendetta against you Fox. You and that old hare you flew with. In the brief time I knew him, he never offered a reason why. But I should have known something was wrong the first time he broke com silence over Fortuna."

"He flew with 'that old hare' and my father," Fox said evenly, without waver in his voice. "He flew with them until Andross bought him out some time before the war. Betrayed my father and killed him."

Wolf nodded. "That would do it," he said, as if some lingering question finally made sense. Another pause floated through the air of the bridge. "And I do not doubt it. As I said, Dengar and Oikonny were not fit for my cockpits. My only regret for their deaths was for the hardware I lost with them. There was no relationship between them and _him,_ or I."

Wolf had looked over their shoulder when he said the word 'him,' but Falco hadn't caught on. "Who is _him_?" the avian asked, raising an eyebrow and jerking his head towards Rhade. "You talking about sports drink over here?"

"Guess again, birdy," a voice said quietly over his shoulder, punctuated by a sharp, shrill hiss.

Falco's eyes widened as the voice found a face in his mind.

"You!" he half-shouted, grabbing his revolver and spinning around. He leveled it at the voice, only to find his hands empty.

A few meters away stood a dull, greenish grey skinned lizard, triangular head cocked to the side with interest in the object he was holding. His dress roughly matched that of Wolf, though his overcoat was a faded grey in color, and substantially more frayed around the edges. His frame seemed unnaturally torqued, with his head and abdomen thrust forward and his chest held back. Though it was a comfortable stance of one of his species, to others it appeared as though he were permanently sucking in his non-existent gut.

"Don't see many of these nowadays." His tongue flipped in and out rapidly as he cocked his head to the other side and cocked the hammer of Falco's revolver. The lizard's words were fast and skittish as he uttered them, as if he were an addict after a week without a fix. If it weren't for his otherwise ice cold demeanor, it would have cost him any sense of intimidation he might have gained through surprise. As it was, the contrast between his voice and posture merely heightened it. He casually leveled the gun at Falco's forehead. "Not in civilized space, anyhow. Though in fairness, people often say the same about me. And you. But I suspect more so me."

"Leon," Falco muttered through gritted teeth as though spitting a curse. He lowered his hands to his sides.

Tension began filling the room. But before it could grow to any significant amount, it was broken by peels of shrieking laughter.

"You didn't even see it!" Leon managed between spasms of mirth. "The world's best lift and he doesn't even see it." He quickly calmed his voice. "Though I guess that's the point." He flipped the revolver in his hand and tossed it back to the avian. After letting go, he clapped his hands together once and spread them flat in the air, as if to underline his peaceful intentions. Falco caught the weapon handily, spinning it in his palm. "I've been standing here for-"

The click of a hammer striking an empty chamber silenced the lizard.

Leon's face suddenly shifted darkly as he stared down the barrel of Falco's reacquired gun. The avian stared right back, over the sights of his weapon, unfazed by the lack of dead lizard in front of him.

"I also removed the _ammunition_, bird," Leon hissed, moving his long, spindly hands to the pair of shinning knives sheathed on his belt. "Not very keen on self preservation, I see; that wasn't a wise move."

"I have a habit of making those," Falco replied with a smirk. His still clung to his revolver, despite its decidedly non-deadly nature. His other hand was fingering a small cylinder on his belt. "How much you wanna bet I can reload before you even draw that kitchenware."

"Easy, Leon," Wolf's raspy voice commanded.

"Falco, cut it out," Fox added, stepping between the two to look his friend in the eye. "In case you haven't noticed, we're not exactly on even terms here. If they wanted to kill us, they would have done it already." Miyu remained silent, but nodded in agreement.

Falco and Leon subtly acknowledged their respective requests, but they never broke their mutual glare. Then, slowly, Falco lowered his revolver, holstering it with a bit more force than was necessary. Leon's arms gradually rose away from his knives to fold at his chest in response.

"Don't touch my gun," Falco added.

Leon shrugged. "Don't make it so easy."

"Alright," Fox began again, turning back to Wolf after the matter was sorted. "Fine. What are we doing here? Running from Cornerians. A patrol picked us up just outside this cloud. Opened fire without warning. It was very…un-Cornerian of them."

Wolf huffed with acknowledgement. "Decidedly so. Although it doesn't surprise me as much as it would have a day ago."

Fox raised an eyebrow before Wolf continued. "What do you mean? You've got to be used to that by now. They fire at Warlord ships on sight."

"Not mine," Wolf corrected, shaking his head. "On any other so-called _Warlords_, yes, but never mine. My men have not attacked any civilian or military targets since forming my organization after Andross' fall. Not without provocation, in any case. And I never intended for them to start. The Cornerians have always let us be for that; we do as we need, and all they see are outlaws attacking outlaws. It is a mutually beneficial arrangement."

"But…something changed," Fox offered.

"Indeed," the lupine responded. "A substantial amount of things changed, that being one of them. But all told, I would say that is one of the least of my worries. It was bound to happen eventually with things going the way they are. Tell me Fox, are you aware of the state of the Lylat System right now? Of the forces currently at work?"

Fox's head cocked to the side in confusion. "No…I'm not sure what you're getting at here Wolf. Why are _you_ here?"

"For the same reason you are, pup; Cornerians. Only, to be honest, I'm not so convinced that they really are as they claim."

"They _claimed _Seventh Fleet; they flew Seventh Fleet colors and ID tags," Falco interjected, glancing briefly at Leon as he spoke. "There's not much more they could do."

"Oh, I am quite sure they are Seventh Fleet," Wolf replied. "But Cornerian…that is another story."

Falco looked at him with skeptic sarcasm, smirking at the idea that a fleet in the Cornerian Military could be considered non-Cornerian. Fox and Miyu looked on with interest. After a pause to gather his thoughts, Wolf continued.

"There are things that require much explaining, which we can get to shortly. But the crux of the matter is that there is a…_confrontation_ in the works. A confrontation between two powers, one of which is at first glance oblivious, and other of which is rapidly approaching the tipping point. One that will pull Lylat into another full scale war, whether the parties involved are aware of it or not."

"A…_war?_" Fox asked, incredulous. "What war? What are you talking about Wolf?"

"The entire Cornerian Seventh Fleet has allied themselves with Warlord Bauker and his coalition," Wolf said flatly. "And they mean to overthrow the Cornerian government."

* * *

Bill had always found a certain charm in local bars and dives around Lylat. A city, no matter how large or small, was many things: a seat of local government, a center of population, a hub for tourists and their fat purses. An innumerable number of qualities and traits defined them all. But if one really wanted to know the heart of the town, what really made its denizens tick and their eyes brighten, there was no better place to learn than the lazy neighborhood tavern.

And judging by the look of Dead Man's Folly, Brehva's heart was full of snow and cheap alcohol.

The thick wooden logs that held out the cold of Fortuna's arctic circle in mid-winter were decorated with all sorts of hunting trophies and old-fashioned winter gear, giving the bar an artificial, faked-authentic feel until one looked closer. The imperfect framing of the animal heads, the faint smell of actual gun powder on the mounted shotguns, the fact that there wasn't a single neon sign in sight; this was no tourist bar. The old, grizzled men drowning their sorrows were real old grizzled men drowning their sorrows.

For the most part Bill was left alone, save the occasional inquiry of service from the bar tender, a rough, matronly hare who looked built enough to serve as barkeep, truck loader and bouncer all at the same time. He shifted on his barstool, quietly adjusting the itchy, torn up clothes he had bought off a homeless man after first landing in Brehva. It had proven to be a smart decision; other than a much cleaner face, he blended in with the rest of the patrons in Dead Man's Folly with ease.

He looked down the bar, where it turned at a right angle and ended in the wall, leaving room for two stools at most. Sitting in one of them was Rhena, staring back at him in silent solidarity. Seated next to her was a younger wolf, nursing his drink with a freshly bloodied bar towel over his snout. Apparently, women with hygiene, or as much hygiene as they were able to maintain aboard the _Great Fox _over the last month, were a rare sight in Brehva. And apparently, someone had gotten a little too nosy for Rhena's comfort.

Bill took another swig of his brew; it was the cheapest on the menu. The loose money they had left over from their shares of the Star Fox team's latest contracts had been largely put towards bribing passage on a freighter from a freeport where they landed their highly conspicuous CDF fighters. Once on Fortuna, they booked similarly discrete passage to the quiet, isolated mining town of Brehva, where they had set up an information drop.

Finally, upon arriving at the town's port and discount vehicle repair shop, Bill acquired his new jacket, a shaggy, beat up old overcoat he wore over the clothes he had borrowed from Fox. Just before arriving at the bar, they had stopped and found Rhena some simple, utilitarian store-bought clothing, plus a hat to hide her brightly colored hair. Not only did the contrast between the hound and Rhena's clothing hide their connection, it also probably prevented the wolf's inevitable death due to exposure.

Bill glanced over at his wingmate again and smirked to himself. Despite wearing short sleeves in freezing weather, he had no doubt that she would've rather frozen than complain. But aside from keeping them alive, the newly acquired attire did a good job of letting them both mesh with the usual tired, soiled crowd of miners and laborers.

However, the end result of all the safety precautions was a severely lightened wallet. Bill reached in his coat and fingered the folded piece of leather holding the currency. After paying the informant, he'd have maybe twenty credits left to find his fiancé. Rhena couldn't have much more.

Bill sighed. He hoped the information would be as promised. The hound had little experience with underworld dealings; his only other experience had been the drop on Corneria a month ago, and that had been entirely set up by Fox and Falco. That he had been able to find his contact in Brehva had been miracle enough, but he silently asked whatever deities existed that the contact had legitimate information as well.

He also prayed that the contact wasn't keen on keeping up with the bounty notices.

Someone fell onto the stool next to him with a heavy presence. Without turning, Bill could see the figure's reflection in one of the promotional mirrors produced by some local brewery or another, hanging behind the bar. It was a burly, heavyset pig, dressed in similar fashion to the hound with his shoddy brown overcoat. Unlike the hound though, the swine's huge frame filled every inch of his rags.

"Whiskey on Edge," he gruffly announced to the bartender, who grunted in reply and went about mixing the simple drink. She pulled a tiny cube from a small box and tossed it in the orange fluid of a stout glass, releasing the carbonation agent and sugar that gave the otherwise straightforward drink its name.

"Sure you're old enough to drink here?" Bill asked as the bartender slid the glass to the newcomer. He cursed to himself, wishing he had fought the informant's use of the chosen code drink and response phrase. For all he knew, the traditionally feminine drink was all the rage in Brehva, and he had just insulted a pig who looked like he could easily pluck the arms from the hound's sockets and use them as back scratchers. The bartender grunted in amusement at the slight, or the hound's imminent savage beating, Bill couldn't tell which.

The massive swine turned towards Bill, glaring down at the Cornerian with beady eyes. His snout flared once, then twice, as the seconds ticked by. The man was easily twice his size in every dimension. Despite his best efforts, Bill's ears slouched and he began shaking his head. It had been too long. This wasn't him.

"Of uh…of course you are," he stammered nervously, slapping the man's knee. The pig eyed his knee and then continued the glare, somehow with a heightened intensity. Bill's stomach flipped. "Wow, that was…oh god. Do you want another drink? Another Edge? Barkeep! Another, another drink for the fine gentleman. You know, I enjoy those myself every-"

"Easy, Sebastian," a voice from the other side of the mountainous pig said calmly. "He's our man."

The swine never broke eye contact with Bill, but the hostility died from his face. Now he just looked annoyed.

From behind the pig, a comparatively small, thin raccoon hopped off his barstool, making his way around Bill to the open stool on the other side. Bill swung back towards the bar, breathing a deep sigh followed by a long pull from his drink. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the pig losing interest, turning to his own drink and taking a sip.

"Sorry buddy," the raccoon chuckled, slapping Bill on the back. His voice had a light lilt to it, a stark contrast to the gruff cadence of words offered Bill since arriving. "I don't get many customers from out of a town, so I gotta take advantage of 'em when they come." He pointed towards the pig. "Don't you worry, Sebastian wouldn't hurt a fly so long as it didn't wrong 'im. And so long as it didn't land in his Edge. Name's Basser. I take it you're…"

"Mr. Green," Bill replied, putting down his drink and shaking the offered hand. "You've got a funny way of saying hello."

"Hey, like I said; not many outsiders choose Brehva, and nobody who lives here would believe for a second that Sebastian would hurt someone for an insult like that." Basser smiled widely. "I'm sure you understand."

Bill snorted, but offered a smile to dismiss any negative intentions.

"So, Mr. Green," the raccoon continued, adjusting his heavy coat. It was of a noticeably finer material than anyone else in the bar could lay claim to. "What can I, your humble supplier of information, do for you?"

"I'm looking for a girl," Bill replied, deciding to be as straightforward as possible.

Basser laughed. "Join the club. Though you won't find much in terms of selection in Brehva. Women here tend to be quite…manish."

Bill shook his head, smiling for a moment. "Er, not quite like that. I've been keeping in contact with her remotely from off planet, but she's recently gone missing. I think some bounty hunters may have grabbed her."

"I see," said Basser, holding his chin in thought. "So this girl has a bounty on her head then?"

"Ah, no," Bill answered, catching the mistake he made by bringing up the issue of bounties. Rhena and he had gotten lucky so far in their travels in not getting recognized, but he wasn't sure how long that luck would hold out. Eventually, someone would notice them and make the connection. The trick was making sure it was after they had found Sophia. "But I think someone she knows does, and they're using her to get to that person. I'm working with that person to find her."

"Bait and trap, huh? Seems logical enough," Basser nodded. "Any leads? Or a description I could work with? I don't expect much, Mr. Gray, otherwise you wouldn't need my services, but little things help. Fortuna's a big place."

"Put simply, no," Bill replied. "She hid her position from uh, my employer. It's possible she would be somewhere relatively near a military base though." Bill stopped. A wire snapped somewhere in his mind. "You…you just called me Mr. Grey, didn't you?"

Basser smiled another of his wide smiles. "I did."

Bill's stomach flipped again. His eyes flicked to Rhena, whose free hand subtly fell off the bar and landed somewhere beneath. She shifted a little, giving her a more direct shot and a quicker draw. Meanwhile, her other hand rested easily on her mug.

"Relax, William," the raccoon said, slapping Bill's knee. "I'm not a bounty hunter. Don't get me wrong, fifty thousand's not a bad pay day, but I've no stomach for shootin' and killin' folk. And I get by just fine peddling my wares as is. I don't even know what I'd so with such cash, and greed is a sin you know."

Bill sighed, calculating his response. "You'll forgive me for my skepticism."

"I will, in fact," Basser nodded. "Given your shoes, I'd lace them up the same way. That's probably what's kept you alive for so long."

"How long have you known?"

"Honestly, for about two minutes now. Caught a glimpse of your face from the other side of Sebastian when we first sat down. As you might guess, I make a habit of memorizing valuable bits of information, like who tops the current bounty boards, so your face wasn't hard to match."

Bill was quiet for a moment as Basser looked on. Millions of thoughts tore through his mind; how to get out of the bar being chief among them. However, the raccoon was keen enough to pick up on the issues closest to the surface.

"You've got yourself quite a deal to think about now, don't you Mr. Grey?" he offered. "Well let me lay a few fears to rest. I won't hold you for the bounty. You have my word on that, and that's worth something." He caught the tilt of Bill's eyebrow as the bartender grunted another chuckle, overhearing the conversation as she scrubbed a glass. "Well, _I _think it's worth something, anyway. Gladys. And second, I can guarantee that nobody who's been overhearing this conversation will either. Our town's a respectful community, ain't we?"

"Shut yur face, shithead!" a gruff voice called out from one of the darkened tables.

Basser turned back to Bill, smiling. "So they don't hold my line of work in high regard. Not my fault I wasn't built for hauling ore all my life."

Bill stared back at him.

"Okay, you won't believe me. Again, I can't blame you. But while you're sitting there thinking of a way to get out of this mess alive, could you at least tell me who it is you're looking for?" Basser paused a moment to let the Cornerian respond. When nothing but the same stare was offered, he sighed. "My apartment's not far from here. Tell me who she is, and I'll be back in fifteen with her last known whereabouts…if she's still on planet."

Bill breathed in deeply, feeling defeated. Despite Basser's insistence, he still couldn't shake the feeling the raccoon wasn't as he seemed. A fifty thousand credit bounty sitting right in front of them was too much for anyone to not at least entertain the notion of collecting on it. Especially when a more than able enforcer was between the mark and the exit.

Any violent attempt to escape would be blocked by a tavern full of burly locals, despite their apparent dislike of Basser, so the handgun on his hip felt useless. And any subtle attempt to escape would undoubtedly lead to a foot chase through unfamiliar streets in the biting cold.

"Her name is Sophia," he finally said, reasoning he had nothing to lose. "Sophia Arkanian. She was in the Cornerian Military's medical program last I heard. I don't know which base she was stationed at."

Basser smiled. "Thank you. That wasn't so hard now, was it?"

Again, Bill remained silent.

"Alright, sheesh, I get it. You don't have to say anything more. Now just sit tight for a few minutes while I go find our lady friend here."

"Wait," Bill said as Basser got up to leave. "You'll find her? Just like that?" He sounded incredulous.

"Oh, I still expect payment, don't get me wrong," Basser replied, adjusting his coat with a smile. "But my information network is quite extensive. Stay, finish your drink, and I'll be back with a location, or at least a rough vicinity."

With that, Basser donned his short-brimmed hat from the bar, tapped it in a sign of departure, and briskly walked out the heavy wooden doors of the Dead Man's Folly.

Bill turned in his chair to follow the raccoon with his eyes until the door closed behind the informant. He then glanced at Sebastian, who glared back at him with arms crossed and lips twisted into a superior smirk.

"_Yep," _he thought, rolling his eyes and turning back to the bar. He rested his forehead on his palm. _"What have I gotten myself into?"_

As much as Bill wanted to believe Basser's words, he knew that given his situation, there was no way he could take them at face value. He pushed a long breath through his lips, looking up to find himself staring back through the promotional mirror. For all he knew, that raccoon was sprinting towards the nearest pay phone and calling in the local law enforcement. The bar could be swarming with sheriffs and deputies any minute now.

And yet, not once as he lamented his mistakes did he regret landing on Fortuna. Perhaps his choice of informant, or using any outside help at all, but never the idea of pursuing Sophia. Even now, as he sat pinned on the bar stool with a very large and pig-like weight on his proverbial chest, her image floated through his mind in a way he had prevented himself from allowing during the last month.

Up until half a day ago, he had some vague idea of what he planned on doing to reunite with her one day. He didn't kid himself that the bounty would just fade away eventually, and they could then go back to the way things were. But he would entertain himself as he drifted off to sleep at night aboard the _Great Fox _with thoughts about the intricacies and details surrounding her journey to joining him on the mercenaries' ship. They all ended up as dramatic and utterly fantastical scenarios, but they were enough to keep him going.

But now, with her rescue from imminent danger seemingly foiled before it could even begin, he felt as though he had just heard the news of her disappearance all over again.

"_But what can I do now?" _he wondered, doing his best to appear unworried on the outside by taking a casual glance around the bar. _"What can I-"_

He stopped mid thought. Rhena's stool was empty.

* * *

Basser threw open the door to his apartment, charging in and cursing when he inevitably stubbed his toe in the darkness on the corner of his workstation. He limped to his cabinet and turned it on, sitting down before the door even had time to drift shut.

The ambient glow of his monitor briefly blinded him in the lightless room, but his eyes quickly adjusted. An old analog clock ticked off the seconds somewhere on the thick, wooden walls as his computer system booted up. He tapped his bruised foot impatiently. Time was precious; he could only keep his 'client' waiting for so long before he'd get impatient. Even with Sebastian keeping him there, Basser was sure the Cornerian had some sort of backup hidden somewhere in the bar. And the raccoon wasn't sure he had kept his excitement entirely concealed.

The tapping of keys rapidly being struck filled the room as Basser logged into his network. After passing a series of security checks - one could never be too careful in the information business after all - his screen turned dark, and a pleasant, blue, rectangular map of Fortuna unfolded before him. Various icons and streams of data appeared and disappeared in rapid succession as he got to work.

A quick peak in the backdoor he had planted in the Cornerian Military's most basic network on Fortuna highlighted the base Sophia Arkanian had once worked at. That was the simplest place to start. Basser's forehead creased and he lolled his head from side to side as he thought of the next step. He would've liked to have access to some of the higher level military networks, but knew it would be a pointless exercise. Direct hacking was almost certainly a waste of time, and as one climbed up the level of security clearance, the personnel became harder and harder to bribe.

Mumbling a curse to himself, he backed out of the network and examined the geography surrounding the military base. Mostly tundra outside of a smallish civilian city adjacent to the installation. Akro. That was something, though. Chances were that the group – as it was undoubtedly a group – holding Ms. Arkanian hostage would be holed up somewhere either in the city or just outside it. With Fortuna's harsh winter season setting in, the possibility of loss of power was too great to stray far from civilization.

Basser jumped to another window, the rhythm of his trade setting in as numbers and figures crunched by. Who operated in this city that he had access to? Who would be able to cut a deal with him for the capture of Bill Grey? How would he arrange transport? Directly turning him over to the authorities was squandering a golden ticket. Perhaps he could get more than just a one-time reward out of the deal. If it was a powerful player, perhaps further contracts could be negotiated…

"Hm,," he hummed out loud, giving voice to his machinegun thoughts. An automatically intercepted message from the town sat open on his screen. "What's Black Star doing in Akro?"

The hands around his neck were soft and delicate at first, almost as if they weren't even there. They didn't stay that way for long though.

* * *

"_Man, what would it take to get this guy's attention off me?_" Bill thought, taking another sip of his drink. He glanced back at Sebastian, who had yet to move since Basser left fifteen minutes ago. His eyes hadn't left the hound. _"It's getting a little frustrating. Though I guess that's the point..."_

After finishing his first beer, Bill refused another one, choosing instead to occupy his time trying to get something out of his heavyset guardian. However, after trying everything he could think of to even get the man to say something, he had opted for another drink, if only just to occupy his time.

Bill wasn't worried about finding a way out of the situation. Rhena was probably skulking somewhere nearby if she wasn't tailing Basser back to his workstation, wherever it was. In either case though, Bill knew that the raccoon had no idea she was nearby. Basser had noted his potential bounty reward at fifty thousand earlier in the conversation, the posted bounty for only one of the two mercenaries. And she had a way of solving situations like the one Bill found himself in. Especially when given the gift of surprise.

So the question was not whether he would eventually leave the bar, it was _when_, and with which gains and losses to his quest.

Bill heard a click and stopped.

"Took you long enough," he spoke into his mug before taking a swig. He put the drink down and turned towards Sebastian, raising an eyebrow.

Bill immediately smiled. Despite his nonchalant words, he was grateful to see the dark furred wolf, especially since she had arrived with pistol in hand. It was largely hidden from the rest of bar by her heavy, winterized clothing, but Sebastian had certainly noticed.

She was standing just beside the pig, having silently appeared and staring directly at him until he met her eyes. When he finally did his gaze faltered, if only for a second, under her withering gaze.

"We're going to Akro," she said simply, glancing at Bill briefly before returning to Sebastian. It was like she was daring the pig to try something.

Bill turned back to his drink, downed the rest of it and breathed a sigh of satisfaction. Removing a credit chip from his pocket, he tossed it on the bar and stood, receiving a grunt of thanks from the bartender. He stood facing the wolf and her silent hostage for a moment.

"_So that's what it took."_

_

* * *

_

Miyu took pride in the fact that she felt like she wasn't one to be easily intimidated. Wherever her 'career' had taken her, she was always one to take things head on. It even applied to her revenge quest against Fox a month ago. A small team of mercenaries wasn't going to keep her from taking back what was hers.

However, Wolf O'Donnell's fleet was another story entirely.

She watched the palm sized projections of four wireframe ships gliding in slow motion through the air just above the center table of Wolf's spartan ready room. One of them she recognized as the _Great Fox_, still unmoved from its position underneath the much larger wireframe of the _Lone Wolf_. The latter occupied the center of the projection. Far off in the distance, maybe a foot in the projector's limited space, two identical, smaller wireframes slowly shifted and turned about.

About the size of the _Great Fox_, the two unknown wireframes looked like they were lazily scouting the air of the room, though Miyu knew it probably meant they were somewhere off in the reactor cloud. Miyu wondered briefly how they were staying in contact with the _Lone Wolf_ in the radioactive soup of the cloud, but she chalked it up to the higher grade equipment a ship like the one she sat in now could utilize.

She was the only one who took Wolf's invitation to sit in one of the pair of comfortable chairs in the small room just off the bridge. Fox stood off to one side a bit with his arms crossed while Falco was leaning against the bulkhead on the opposite side of her. Wolf and Leon stood together by the door, with the former doing most of the talking. The room was just big enough to fit all five of them in reasonable comfort. It had been a slight issue at first, but eventually the officer who had led them up to the bridge in the first place – Rhade, Miyu remembered – had been convinced to let Wolf and Leon be alone with the mercenaries. Miyu was certain the security team was just on the other side of the door though.

Wolf's voice brought her back from her mental meanderings.

"Whether the Cornerian High Command chooses to admit it or not, most of the so called 'Warlords' have been working together for quite some time," the lupine started. "After the Lylat War ended, there were many in power, Venomian and not, who were left unsatisfied by the outcome. They gathered their resources and began waging a guerilla war of sorts against the new Cornerian superpower."

"We didn't come here for a history lesson," Falco quipped, breathing a sigh of boredom. "And you say that as if you're any different from the rest of 'em."

"We are." Wolf answered with a growl. "See, my men and I did not _have _an outcome to that war. There was no victory or defeat for us. Only a paycheck or lack thereof. Surely _you _can understand _that. _Say whatever it is you want about morals, or choosing the _right _side, but when it comes down to it, we were mercenaries, same as you. Only difference is our employer lost, while yours won."

"Well I can't say that you've done too poorly as a result," Fox said, gesturing around him with his words. "This ship couldn't have been cheap. Much less a whole fleet."

"It wasn't," Wolf replied with something approaching a smile of accomplishment, though it came out more as predatory. "But little in the form of currency was ever exchanged."

"You stole it?"

"You might say that, though it wasn't so much an act of theft. There was a great deal of equipment up for the taking immediately after Andross' fall, yes, but the surviving Venomian officers saw to it that a lowly mercenary such as myself would have no access to it. The fact that my flight of four had done more damage and completed more objectives during the war than they could with half a fleet seemed to be lost on them."

Fox nodded as Wolf continued, suddenly feeling a strange sense of comradery with the lupine. The Cornerian High Command, excluding their direct employer General Pepper, had been no kinder to Star Fox after the war. Despite all they had done for the Cornerians, after the war they had been handed their paycheck and essentially shown the door.

"I wasn't alone. Even as the Cornerian occupation forces landed around them, the Venomian High Command refused hundreds of the lower officers and pilots from boarding the proverbial escape pods. Their best men, who had literally fought the war for them, were being shot for trying to escape with the rest of them on the remaining warships docked on Venom. They were being thrown to the dogs, left to hang for the crimes which their superiors had committed, and which they had no knowledge of."

"When Leon and I got back to our base after our little…_skirmish_ with you, Fox, we found the place in pandemonium. We saw what has happening, and decided to do something about it."

"But who would've listened to you?" Miyu asked, speaking for the first time since her arrival on the _Lone Wolf_. Despite the fact that she had kept her voice level, when Lean and Wolf looked at her as she spoke, she very nearly flinched. "You were just mercenaries, weren't you?"

"Yes, but like I said before, we had done much more damage than the Venomian officers ever wanted to admit. But while the commanders wanted nothing to do with us for showing them up, the enlisted men and junior commissions, many of which we saved during the war, saw us as a focal point. Something to put their weight behind. See, their officers were abandoning them, for no reason other than rank and personal gain. But we were something else entirely. It was our merit, and nothing else, that drew them to us. We had no rank to speak of. But they came nonetheless."

Leon spoke up, continuing the story. "We stormed the _Lone Wolf_ back when it some hideously named pet of the Venomian High Command. The _Chosen One_. Can you believe that? I couldn't. Supposed to be some sort of inspiration in battle. Made repainting the name easier though. Just had to lowercase the 'O' of course, stick an 'L' in front…"

"After we escaped, others sought us out," Wolf said, nodding at Leon's segue. "Those that were tired of fighting for _ideals _and _causes _and the like, shedding their blood for someone else's dream that always turned out to be that person's take on the same damn system. After the first month, we were still the lowest in number of any of the other 'splinter groups' that had escaped the Cornerian blitz, but we were tight. Focused. We rearranged. There was room for everyone, but only those who actually had talent for their job were kept. Captains became cooks, pilots became troopers, and vice versa. Did away with old rank system. No more inexperienced Commanders lording over their experienced lieutenants, placed there because of privledge or favors. If you had ability somewhere, that was where you were assigned. If not, you were support. Simple. Efficient. How it should have been."

"We found an abandoned mining base on one of Fortuna's moons and set up. The Cornerians tracked us there, but after we blunted every advance and made none of their own, they let us be. They called me a Warlord, but unlike the others, I have no intention of grabbing for power and territory, playing the Lylat System like some game."

"So you have this fleet now," Fox said, sounding confused. "But what do you do with it? Or rather, what _did_ you do with it? Just because you got the Cornerians to leave you alone, doesn't mean they wouldn't take you out at the first sign of hostile activity towards them."

"To be honest, I was still working that out," Wolf admitted, his gravelly voice falling a notch. "The idea was to wait out the storm, let the entire Cornerian 'Warlord Campaign' finish up before trying anything, though we would most likely turn into a mercenary company. There are those in my fleet who hold their grudges, but most have come to realize the insanity of the future Andross dreamed of. The Cornerian reality isn't much better, but it _is _stable, and that is a start. Mercenaries may thrive on war, but not utter chaos."

"Which brings us full circle I guess," Fox said. "That's what you suggested on the bridge, right? A plot to overthrow the Cornerian government?"

Wolf nodded. "I did."

"A plot involving the entire Cornerian Seventh Fleet," Falco stated skeptically.

"Correct."

The Star Fox team remained quiet for a moment, deciding what to make of such a claim. Wolf took the silence as an implicit question of proof, and explained.

"As I said, there were many in power who were left unsatisfied by the war's outcome. Andross' surviving scientists and supporters of his wartime experimentation on sentient beings were quickly talked down for obvious reasons, but there were those who were merely diametrically opposed to the Cornerian philosophy."

"Which is…?"

"Control, bird," Wolf stated flatly. "Peace through control. Whether overt or implicit, the Cornerian government is, at its heart, a controlling organization. That is why it exists, that is what it exists for. Because the fact is that the majority of the citizens of the Lylat System want that. They are perfectly willing to give up some measure of freedom in return for some measure of stability and protection."

"And now the Seventh Fleet's against that?" Falco asked, trying to piece things together in his mind but coming up empty. Wolf's direct and erudite manner of speaking wasn't helping.

"It started with the Bauker," Wolf replied, nodding. "The Warlords originally went their own ways, or even fought with each other over the remnants of Andross' war machine. They didn't seem to have a goal or purpose in mind. Bauker gave them that focus. He called a meeting a few months after the Lylat War, inviting the Warlords to a truce of sorts. He spoke of his vision for Lylat, of how Corneria was using the results of the war as an excuse to exert control over the entire system. He urged them to unite, to stop Corneria's tyranny. To bring the true image of a Venomian society to light; one of freedom and self government, not the bastardized version Andross had enforced. Ironic, in a funny sort of way; they never seem to realize how easily those arguments fall against history."

"_They_?" Falco asked, smirking. "You mean you weren't invited to the super special meeting?"

"I was, but I had no desire to sit through another savior's religious sermon. They have a tendency to start to run together after awhile."

"Then how do you know all this?"

"I will get to that in due time," Wolf promised. "During the meeting, Warlord Omaya protested, insisting Bauker was playing a trick on them. He said Bauker would ask them politely to hand over their fleets for the greater good, and then kill them. Omaya had enough sway back then to convince enough of the lesser Warlords to agree."

"Then Omaya got himself killed and his fleet destroyed and captured by the Cornerians. That was no more than a few months ago. Bauker called the meeting again. The Warlords listened this time. Raymund, Ypson, Norwood…they all threw in with Bauker. With additional mercenary and private military support, Bauker's fleet became the second largest in Lylat to Corneria. With the Seventh Fleet, they're about even. Trouble is, the Green has no idea. Bauker is playing the Cornerian High Command like a fool, ordering his coalition to feint each other to hide the fact that they are working together."

"How did the Seventh Fleet come into this?" Fox asked. "Just the logistics…you think someone would have noticed, you know? It just seems a little odd that an entire fleet would turn against its government like that."

"It does, doesn't it?" Leon said with a shiver-inducing smile. "It seems not all is well in the rank and file of Corneria's grand ol' military. What's that old saying? 'The surface shines while the inside rots'? I like that one. Very…descriptive."

"I honestly do not know how the Seventh Fleet's rebellion started," Wolf admitted. "But I do know that they are no longer loyal to Corneria. Which includes their regulations. Which includes holding fire against a target until a solid ID and annunciation of intentions. The fact that nobody has been successful in reporting it to the Cornerian High Command shows you just how deep it goes. Most likely to Admiral Gage himself. He is a very experienced commander. His men would listen if he made a good enough argument for rebellion."

Fox listened as Wolf described the events alluded to earlier, how he and his men were chased from their base by Admiral Gage the day before. The Cornerians had shown up without excuse, without announcing themselves, and attacked with overwhelming force. Wolf admitted that he hadn't expected any formal protocols to be honored given his 'Warlord' status, but the single-mindedness with which they attacked his forces was unreal. Wolf's fleet was decimated and split apart, his base utterly destroyed.

"As far as I know," he finished, gesturing towards the wireframes moving about in front of Miyu, "This is all that is left." The wireframes continued to slowly spin around each other. "All because of what my men and I know."

Falco raised an eyebrow. "Isn't that a little paranoid?"

"Is it?" Wolf questioned. "Admiral Gage had no proper reason for being anywhere near my base; Fortuna is Second Fleet territory. If the Cornerian High Command wanted me dead or running, then that would have been one thing. But those were Seventh Fleet ships. And they weren't alone."

"Bauker?" Fox asked.

Wolf nodded solemnly. "In addition to the normal loadout of smaller Cornerian ships and fighters there were many Venomian models. We would have turned them back if it weren't for those reinforcements, or at least fought them to a stalemate."

"So you ran," Falco concluded, nodding thoughtfully. "And pretty damn well, too; I didn't see a scratch on this ship the whole way in. So much for that 'all for one' jazz, eh?"

Wolf turned his head to glare at Falco as though he were staring down an annoying insect. His one eye narrowed with intensity. Before he could say, or do, anything to punish the bird for such a remark though, Leon verbally stepped in.

"Pretty sure boss man doesn't know how to retreat," the lizard said with a hiss. "Wanted to go back for the men, but the bridge crew wouldn't budge. See, we all know our place here; it's a like sitting down to a big family dinner table. Except some of us bring guns, some bring armor, some have fancy little hats and badges and ranks and glasses to make them feel good about themselves. They saw how important he was, and how going back was suicide. So I knocked him out, took command, and got us out. Most Venomian crews are used to-"

"My men made a diversion for me so the _Lone Wolf_ could get away." Fox caught the pain in Wolf's voice as he interrupted Leon; it was very subtle, and came off more as a bruised ego, but it was definitely there. The weight of living when others died was a familiar theme to the vulpine, and during the past month, he had seen it on occasion from Bill, and to a lesser extent Linka.

"So yes, I am sure; they were after me for what I know."

"And how _do_ you know all this?" Miyu asked, venturing another question.

"I have sources," Wolf replied, pressing his lips into a line. "In the Seventh Fleet, and elsewhere. One was even the Wing Commander for Gage, but that lead went cold about a month ago after one of Gage and Bauker's faked 'skirmishes' in Sector Z. No, we kept our noses out of outside affairs after settling on Fortuna's moon, but not our eyes, nor our ears."

"We do not want to save the Lylat System from any one side or government," he finished. "Only entropy."

The room settled for a moment. As Falco and Miyu digested everything that had just been thrown at them, Fox took the opportunity to speak up.

"So I suppose the million-credit question is, why tell us all this?" he asked seriously. "Why bring us here?"

This time, Wolf's grin lost all predatory notes, and came off as one of genuine mirth. Or as close as one such as Wolf O'Donnell could come to such a thing.

"Because pup, whether you believe it or not, I need you," he said, quickly adding, "And do not think I don't see the humor in this situation, either. But the truth is that this really is all I have left." He again gestured to the wireframes. "A pair of frigates, this carrier, and a squadron of mixed fighters. That is not nearly the sort of manpower or equipment necessary to resist and stop a war from erupting, is it?"

"But why us?" Fox asked, crossing his arms. "Why us and not all the other mercenary units out there? The actual _companies _of platoons and squadrons?"

"Because I know you."

"Whadya mean?" Falco shot back, narrowing his eyes. "This is the first time you've seen us outside a cockpit. And probably the longest single time you've spoken with us. All you've ever done when we've met is try to kill us!"

Wolf cocked his head, an unusual motion for someone of his stature. "Is that not the same as knowing you?"

Falco opened his mouth to reply but stopped. He closed it after a moment of thought, not entirely certain what the lupine was trying to say, but sure there was something of value in his reply.

"I will make this simple, then," Wolf continued, taking a breath. "What my flight was to the Cornerians, yours was for Andross. I have heard a dozen of Venom's commanders spin you and your pilots into Sol's damn vengeful scythe. Even without your old hare flying with you, your combat ability as a flight-"

"Wait, wait, hold on," Fox interrupted, drawing a glare from both former members of Star Wolf. "Peppy? How do you know Peppy's not flying with us anymore?"

"Like I said…sources." Wolf paused, indicating his desire to drop the subject. "Truthfully, your participation in this coming series of events could be pivotal. And I would like to ensure that you are entering them on the right side of things."

"_Your _side," Falco deadpanned. "Sounds an awful lot like something one of those 'ideal' guys you hate so much would say."

"_No _side," Wolf corrected, flicking his eyes at Falco and then back to Fox. "I want your help to ensure that there is no war, that there _are _no sides. Do not confuse this as a crusade for ideals; it is one for a lack of them. At least in any major, governing capacity."

Fox felt Wolf's eyes settle on him, expecting a response, but there was no way he could speak at the moment; his mind was drowning. All of the information regarding Wolf's battalion of ex-venomian soldiers and pilots provided a swirling backdrop to the storm in his head, while the revelation about the brewing forces of war struck up a tsunami of thought. Somehow, he didn't doubt Wolf's accusations and claims; something about the way the lupine spoke made Fox trust him implicitly, a trait the vulpine was well aware of being a potential fault.

And yet, there was an eye to the mental storm; a calm center, focused entirely on Peppy. Regardless of the sources Wolf was talking about when he brought the hare up, Peppy's name was enough to draw Fox in, allowing him to shut out the hurricane of analysis tearing through his brain.

Star Fox had a mission before Wolf took them aboard; find Peppy. The threat of war, the possibility that millions or billions could be swept up in another system wide conflict paled in importance to the mercenary. Sure, it was something to consider, but only when Fox's surrogate father was safely back aboard the _Great Fox _where he belonged.

Fox snapped back to reality to find four pairs of eyes watching him with interest. Wolf had just asked him something. Fox didn't hear what it was, but he could guess.

"I'll consider it," he said finally after another period of silence. Wolf frowned, apparently unhappy with the answer.

"I would not expect you to be someone as such," Wolf began, his respect for the vulpine visibly dropping a notch. "But if it's a matter of payment, then-"

"No," Fox stopped him, stepping forward and meeting Wolf's eyes. "I mean, of course it might be, but that's not what I mean. I _will_ consider the job, but if you want _any _chance of getting our help, I need _your_ help with another matter, first. A few, actually."

Wolf blinked when Fox used the word 'job,' and was about to interrupt the mercenary, but when he heard what else he had to say, the lupine stopped.

"What did you have in mind?" he asked, arching an eyebrow.

"First, and most importantly: I don't care how you know," Fox replied, "But your source is right. Peppy's not flying with us, because he was captured by Blue Arrow a month ago."

"Bauker's shipping front," Wolf said without emotion.

Fox nodded, expecting the statement. "We got our first lead on him just before the Cornerians found us. There's a Blue Arrow freighter en route to Katina right now which may have some information on where he is in its databanks. But it's on a very tight schedule. We were going to intercept it when the patrol found us."

"And you want my help finding this freighter."

"Yes."

"…Done."

"…Done?" Fox stared at Wolf for a second, unbelieving. "Just like that?"

"Yes. And I'll tell you why," Wolf said, nodding. "I believe you will find that our goals are very closely linked. Bauker has always had something off about him. Charismatic, strong willed, idealistic, but distinctly _off_ at the same time. I do not believe the fact that Peppy Hare was captured is just a coincidence."

This time Fox raised his eyebrow. "What do you mean?"

Wolf smiled, now back to his predatory grin. "Not until we are working together, I'm afraid. What else?"

Fox remained perplexed, unsure of what to make of Wolf's sudden secrecy. However, he retained enough presence of mind to recall the other matter pressing him. "There's a pilot on my ship; a girl. She's been injured pretty badly, and we don't have a proper med bay to patch her up. Can't exactly take her a hospital, either."

Wolf nodded solemnly. "I will have my medical personnel take a look at her." He stared at Fox for a moment, expecting more. The vulpine turned his head a little, indicating he was done. Wolf took a breath. "Well, I accept your offer, _on_ the counter condition that you assist me in escaping the Cornerians, who are undoubtedly forming a perimeter around us as we speak."

Fox nodded; he had many questions that needed further answering, but he also had what he needed for the moment. Their immediate goal was mutual, in any case. "Alright."

"And you know we never said we would _definitely _help," Falco spoke up, holding up a hand. "There's no obligation on our part."

Wolf's smile returned. "Like I said. I do not think that will be an issue."

* * *

"You did _what?_"

"Katt, settle down. We never committed to anything."

"And you think that _matters? _Didn't he try to _kill _you guys? _Twice!"_

"He said chill out, ya crazy broad. Ever hear of something called trust? I…Hey wait, yeah; Fox, what the _hell _were you doing back there? We can't trust Wolf! He tried to kill us!"

"Falco, I heard Ka-"

"Twice!_"_

Fox stood in the doorway of the small mechanic's room in the bow of the _Great Fox_. The room contained about a closet's worth of floor space, though the mechanical and electrical guts that formed the back of the ship's main cannons spilled out to cover about ten times that. Wires and various bits of every imaginable mechanical device littered the area, most of it jury-rigged and hastily reconnected, the results of Slippy's endless tinkering. The toad's mechanical genius had resulted in a vastly improved weapons system, but the utter chaos of patchwork systems was the result.

Slippy was currently deep in a forest of connections, nestled between the massive twin turbine-like structures that took up most of the room's space. An occasional rustling of wires indicated his presence.

Katt stood opposite Fox, one hand on her hip and the other gesturing towards the vulpine with a spanner in a way that could only be described as threatening. She had changed back into her jumpsuit from Shoana, though it was possible that she had simply never taken it off from the night before. A checkered bandana held her hair out of her face, which was covered in dark streaks. Some were the usual smears of oil that accompanied any mechanical exploration, but at least one looked like it was blackened fur, singed from a short somewhere in the tangle of wires.

Falco stood behind Fox in the hall, unable to squeeze into the tight floor space of the room.

Katt rolled her eyes at Falco, but returned to spear Fox in her sights, expecting an answer.

Fox sighed, holding out his hands in exasperation. "I don't know what to tell you. If the man wanted to take us down, he could do so anytime he wants. He said he'd help us with intercepting the freighter with Peppy's info on it, knowing we've committed to nothing. I appreciate your helping Slippy, and I know where you're coming from, but I don't think we have anything to fear from Wolf. Not right now at least."

Katt tilted her head back, jabbing at Fox's chest with her wrench. "Not right _now_? Listen to yourself, Foxie! I would have expected bonehead over here to jump into a deal with his own grim reaper so quickly, but not you."

"Hey!"

"Listen, this is the situation," Fox replied, his voice rising a bit. "I'm sorry you're stuck here Katt, I really am, but we are _not _missing this chance to find Peppy, okay?" He took a step forward into her wrench. "We are _not_. And the _Great Fox _is in no shape to catch the freighter in time. So if Wolf provides us a means to rescue the man who has _raised _me since I was a pup, _so be it_."

Katt met his glare, catching the sudden intensity in Fox's green eyes. She opened her mouth to respond, but closed it, unable to say anything. Her gaze remained, but for a moment, it looked like her edge was beginning to dull.

Fox took it as a sign. "Alright then." He finally broke the stare down with the feline, turning to Falco. "Go down to the hanger and help Miyu and Jason load the _Firestorms _in the Arwings. We're gonna need 'em, and those two have no idea what they're doing. I'm gonna go get Linka ready."

Falco and Katt glanced at each other in a rare moment of ceased hostilities.

"Ready for what?" Falco called after Fox, who was walking down the corridor towards the _Great Fox_'s medical bay.

"Weren't you paying attention?" he called back over his shoulder. "In a few minutes a team of Wolf's boys're gonna come aboard to take her off. They're probably gonna be heavily armed too, so no sudden movements."

Falco and Katt's simultaneous exclamation echoed down the hallway.

"_What?"_

_

* * *

_

The cramped bridge of the Cornerian _Slingshot_ class frigate was eerily quiet for the amount of action that was waiting to occur. The entire crew knew full well that it was only a matter of time before the ship they had just chased into the reactor cloud before them would have to emerge. The warlord's ship's shields wouldn't be able to last forever, though projections indicated they should have failed long ago.

In back of the small room, a captain sat drumming his fingers on his command chair's armrest. He glanced at a radar screen before him, studying the positions of the circle of dots surrounding the cloud. They were spaced out both on the Lylat System's primary plane, and vertically, ensuring no warlord ship would escape the cloud undetected. However, his corvettes would have to constantly patrol a little to make sure every vector was covered.

"Where are those reinforcements? O'Donnell's boys could make a run for it at any time."

"Captain Parth, we're a two hour burn from the nearest patrol, and they have yet to respond."

"_Two hours_? Lieutenant, I know for a fact that there's a Second Fleet outpost a rocket shot away from here! Where are _they_?"

"Sir, Commander Bishop insisted that we avoid contact with standard Cornerian forces at all costs. This was supposed to be a covert action-"

"Bah," the captain interjected, waving away the notion. "How were we going to launch a full scale raid O'Donnell's base and keep it under wraps? The very idea was lunacy. The fact that the warlord himself got away just proves my point."

"Sir, I don't think-"

"Contact!" the radar operator shouted, cutting the Lieutenant off. Sirens blared to life as the activity of the bridge crew suddenly kicked into gear. "Corvette Two reports contact with hostile frigate, accompanied by fighters."

"Finally," Captain Parth sighed. "Move us into position. Order all corvettes to converge on that battered piece of junk. Should be easy pickings; that cloud couldn't have been kind to it."

* * *

"Are you sure this is smart, Fox?" Miyu's com portrait asked as Fox's Arwing juked around another shot from the Cornerian corvette.

"Wolf's plan is sound," he replied, jamming the flight stick to the right to swoop around the boxy corvette again. "Besides, the old girl's drawing enough fire so we should be okay." The _Great Fox _whirled by his cockpit as he goosed his thrusters, timing the boosts to be erratic and unpredictable.

"Could have-hah!" Miyu yelped, her image fizzling for a moment as her Arwing took a glancing blow from the corvette's deadly turrets. "Could've fooled me."

"Stay tight 'round the 'vette, Miyu," Fox called. "We just need them to bite."

The corvette was beating a hasty retreat, heading towards the rapidly approaching _Slingshot _frigate. On virtually all sides, the mercenaries' radars pinged with the approaching signatures of the Cornerian patrol's other corvettes. The three Arwings travelled with the stricken ship, buzzing tiny orbits around the corvette like angry hornets. Their initial salvo of missiles had severely weakened its shields, but they had been unable to make a straight enough approach to get another launch off. They straightened their vectors to unleash the occasional burst of laser fire to keep the gunners' attention, but they otherwise did very little further damage to it.

The _Great Fox _loomed over the smaller hostile craft, just about to fully leave the reactor cloud. The vapor trails of solid projectiles lanced out between the corvette and the mercenary ship, but they ended at the edge of the latter's shield radius. Its intimidating cannons remained silent, as Slippy and Katt were unable to get the weapons working again before their break. The ship's speed was likewise at a crawl, one of its three engines still darkened and without the glow of thrust.

Overall, the _Great Fox _was exactly as the Cornerians expected it would be: damaged and limping. Its shields were working, absorbing the corvette's shots with only minor increments of power lost, but it was otherwise a floating target.

"Alright," Falco said, drawing out the second syllable. "They're biting."

A shot from nowhere scored a solid hit against the avian's shields, reducing them from pristine to failing in a single shot. Another corvette was joining the fray.

"_Shit_!" he hollered, kicking his Arwing into a roll and looping back towards the _Great Fox _for cover. "They're _definitely _biting! Where the hell is he?"

"Just a little longer," Fox growled.

Miyu hummed worriedly, boosting away from the original corvette only to spot another in her sights.

It was briefly obscured by a round, metal object.

Miyu's vision flashed and she suddenly felt blood on her cheek, only noticing in passing as she veered away again that there was a small red smear on her dashboard. Her harness suddenly felt tight around her chest, and she felt the burn in her skin where it had tightened. Her ears were still ringing from the force of her head hitting console.

"G-guys?" she moaned quietly, as though in a daze. The lynx was still piloting, but her eyes refused to stop throwing blurry little spots against her HUD.

"Hold on," Fox pleaded, his voice half begging, half ordering. His Arwing lined up for a shot against the original corvette. A stream of bright laser fire pinged off its shields, doing little in terms of damage, but causing a few turrets which had been previously focused on the _Great Fox _to become interested in him.

A bright light caught his attention, lazily drifting in from outside the engagement. Fox followed it with his view, tilting the Arwing and pulling the joystick, watching as the light materialized and plowed into the side of his home. It splashed against the _Great Fox_'s shields, dissipating but causing heavy damage to the protective system. Fox glanced at his HUD, his heart sinking as the _Fox_'s shield gauge dropped by half.

The _Slingshot _had arrived.

"God_dammit_," Falco called out. "I knew it! I knew that scarred up son of a bitch was gonna use us." The avian paused as another corvette projectile narrowly missed his fighter. "He's probably ducking out the other friggin' side of the cloud right-"

Falco's transmission cut out, and for a moment Fox feared the worst. As he twisted around one corvette and boosted to another though, he briefly glimpsed the avian's Arwing, still in one piece. Fox squinted at his HUD as he lined up the second corvette. Falco hadn't been hit, either. His transmission had just stopped.

"_What's going_-"

Answering his question before he could finish, two bolts of heavy light abruptly collided with the corvette in his sights.

Fox replayed the image in his mind as the lumbering chunks of energy entered from his peripheral on their course towards the Cornerian ship; they hadn't been insubstantial at all. He saw the solid projectiles at the tip of a large flower of fire. Those were rockets.

More specifically, those were frigate gauge rockets.

Another pair of the warheads hit the corvette from out of sight, staggered slightly so one of them took down the ship's remaining tatters of shields while the other struck head on. The Cornerian ship's engines flared beautifully for a moment before an explosion tore the vessel apart from within, sending shrapnel in all directions.

Fox didn't hesitate. He banked his Arwing and swooped around, back towards the reactor cloud. For a moment, all he could see was the _Great Fox_, standing out against the backdrop of swirling grey. Another corvette stood between him and his home, though it had strangely stopped firing.

Then he saw the other ship.

The smooth, protruding nose of the deep black vessel looked like the keel of a maritime boat had been flipped upside down. It had a pair of large, deadly cannons mounted on a heavy turret, streamlined and slung beneath the bow, on the flat underside of the ship. As it emerged from the cloud, it revealed the rest of its long shape, stretching straight back a bit until it ended with a large engine block, jutting out on either side from the otherwise uniform body. A pair of main cannons were mounted on either side just before the engines, ending about halfway forward on the hull.

Fox recognized it as a modified version of Andross' old Dorisby class warship. Despite its origins though, he breathed a sigh of relief as the ship overtook the similarly-sized _Great Fox, _noticing the red wolf's paw on its side.

He keyed his mic, but received only static. Something was jamming the communications systems.

Fox paid it little mind though, as a corvette's slug pinged off his shields, sending a shudder through the Arwing and jerking the vulpine against his harness. Ignoring the communications black out for the moment, he spun his fighter into a barrel roll, throwing off a target lock before boosting towards the reactor cloud. On the other side of the _Great _Fox, a second black frigate emerged, clearing the grey and targeting the nearest corvette. Its massive turret swiveled smoothly, lining up a shot and launching a pair of heavy rockets at the unlucky Cornerian ship.

It was beautiful.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the engine flares of the two other Arwings, the three of them flying towards the trio of frigates like children to the protective arms of their parents. The corvettes had taken their guns off the mercenaries in favor of the new, much more dangerous targets, but Fox didn't want to take his chances with his battered Arwing. The remaining Cornerian corvettes were outmatched by the two frigates, but the _Slingshot _would even things up some.

Then, as Fox was crossing the impromptu battle line that had appeared between the two sides, he saw it.

It reminded him of how the _Great Fox _had once emerged into the null-river a month ago in Sector X, surfacing from the gas in a glorious, simultaneous show of grace and destructive power. Except this time, the ship in question dwarfed the mercenary ship.

The _Lone Wolf _neatly parted the gases of the reactor cloud, its bow slipping into visible space. Its turrets sprang to life as they appeared, spouting deadly streams of lasers and projectiles into the line of corvettes like hellfire. Under the combined onslaught, the Cornerians had no chance. The corvettes were destroyed one after the other, their remains blending into the scrap field surrounding the reactor cloud. Before Wolf's flagship had even entirely left the cloud, they were alone with a rapidly turning _Slingshot _class Cornerian frigate.

The _Lone Wolf_'s turrets turned on the frigate, but it was too far out of range for most of the shorter ranged weapons. Vapor trails from the slug-throwing cannons sprouted between the two ships, but more often than not they arched wide. Wolf's flagship was a powerful vessel, but the smaller _Slingshot _class frigate had range and speed on its side. It wasn't returning fire as it pushed its engines to carry it away from the woefully doomed battle, but it wouldn't need to in order to reach safety.

Fox briefly wondered if he and his wingmates should chase it down, but quickly dismissed the idea as far too dangerous. Not only did he have no communication to coordinate a bombing run, but the shield gauges on his HUD told him that neither he nor the other Arwings had the protection to go up against a frigate by themselves.

The vulpine then noticed another flare of fighter engines, though this time there were four, and they were coming from one of the Lone Wolf's hangers.

Streaking across his field of vision, the quartet of black and red shapes resolved themselves into bombers, the very ones he had seen earlier aboard Wolf's ship. Fox mentally traced their flight path, easily linking it with the retreating Cornerian frigate.

The mercenary's heart swelled, and he immediately banked hard, yanking the stick and putting himself directly in the wake of the bombers. He trailed them in at a short distance, not wanting to offend any formation or pattern they had planned. Attacking the frigate alone in a fighter was suicide. But attacking in a pack…that sounded like fun.

Glancing back behind him, Fox spotted another Arwing on his tail. It was impossible to catch who was piloting it, and his radar was unreliable thanks to whatever was jamming his communications, but he was glad one of his wingmates decided to join the fray.

"_Probably Falco_," he thought with a smirk. "_Wouldn't miss the chance to paint a whole damn frigate on his kill board."_

The train of six ships streamed towards the frigate, the small amount of turrets capable of firing backwards doing so to little effect. The _Slingshot _frigate was designed as a warship-killer, chipping away at opponents from afar. It usually relied on friendly fighters and corvettes to handle the threat of enemy bombers.

Stripped of any external protection, the Cornerian frigate was a sitting duck.

In spread line formation, the sleek bombers lined up and released their payloads in two waves before peeling off. Sixteen high yield warheads kept going where the bombers turned away, their fates sealed as they passed under the arcs of the frigate's point defense turrets. The first wave splashed brilliant blue waves of destruction across the ship's invisible shields, rippling outward with each explosion.

Fox watched as the azure color of the frigate's shields began shifting higher, becoming lighter and lighter until the ripples of energy were almost translucent. The protection was on its last legs, struggling to hold up against the onslaught of warheads and successful shots from Wolf's warships. The vulpine flipped a toggle on his stick as the second wave of missiles collided, the _whir _from somewhere beneath his console occurring near simultaneous with the blossoms of destruction.

Half of the bombers' warheads stripped the frigate of its last layer of shields, leaving it bare for the others to proceed unhindered. They collided with the Cornerian ship's hull, buckling armor and ripping plating from its mountings. The engine block of the long vessel was ripped open, a gaping hole spouting vapor about a fifth of the way up the length of the frigate. One of the two engines sputtered and failed, but somehow, the other remained active, still enough to keep the _Slingshot _class out of range of the _Lone Wolf_.

Fox hoped to fix that.

With the rear point defense turrets obliterated by the explosions, the mercenary took his time while keeping his Arwing's speed, gently nudging the crosshairs on his HUD over the breach. As the frigate loomed large out his cockpit, he struggled to fix his aim.

Finally, he got a solid tick on the armor gap, and squeezed down on the trigger. The Arwing shuddered as it released its missiles, suffering the backwash of the warheads' powerful thrusters flaring to life as they left their launch tubes.

Fox followed them in, leaving a safe distance as the pair of missiles charged forward. The first exploded along the outer hull of the frigate, shattering armor but otherwise doing no further harm. The other looked for a moment like it would be able to sneak into the hole in the frigate's structure, but at the last moment caught an edge and detonated, only expanding the breach.

He cursed once for his aim, and twice when he heard the _click_ of his missile tubes rearming. It was too late. He was too close. Stomping the left yoke, he kicked the Arwing up on its side and pulled a tight turn, peeling away.

As he did, Fox was able to catch a good view of his wingmate following his attack run. Waiting just a little longer than he had, the second Arwing deployed its warheads and looped up and back. The shots were straight and true, both disappearing into the frigate's wound moments before detonating in a brilliant double flash.

Fox poured energy into his engines to outrun the resulting explosive energy, catching up with the other Arwing as they threaded through Wolf's bombers. They had been readying for a second bombing run that was clearly not needed at this point.

He let out a shout of elation just as the com jamming cleared, sending his voice across the open channel.

"Hell of a shot, Falco!"

A portrait unfolded on his HUD just as he pulled even with the victorious Arwing.

"Hey, no _problem_, ya _know_?" Miyu retorted, doing her best to impersonate Falco's facial expression and for the most part failing horribly. The lynx was laughing in spite of herself though, making it an endearing gesture. Spying Fox's Arwing off on her wing she dropped the act and lifted a thumb out the cockpit, winking with a smirk.

"Miyu?" Fox's eyes widened for only a moment before letting his expression fall into mirth, and returning the victory sign with his hand. "Not bad kid," he continued jokingly. "Not bad at all."

Miyu grinned, relishing the feeling of sheer accomplishment sweeping across her mind. Granted, the frigate she had just destroyed wouldn't have survived another bombing run by Wolf's pilots, but it was _her _that managed to get the killing shot; _she _scored that hit. And moreover, her shots landed when Fox's didn't, which only added to the feeling. Despite the number of engagements she had fought in the Star Fox team's Arwings, the vulpine patronized her regarding its operation. Perhaps it was only insurance that his wingmate would know what she was doing, but it had been starting to get annoying.

Miyu was able to admit to herself that she would still take a good long time to fully master the Arwing's 'personality,' but she was far from a novice at this point. And being able to throw something in Fox's face regarding flying it simply felt good.

Wolf's voice booming over the com lifted her from her thoughts.

"Fox, I have dropped the com jamming; recall your men," his portrait said, both suggesting and commanding at the same time. "I have an appointment to keep. And I believe you have a freighter to catch."

* * *

A/N's: My thanks to Broken Wolf for correcting the color of Wolf's eyes. Gracias mi amigo.

On to the reviews!

**Wanderling**: Thanks for the review! Hopefully a few of your questions were answered this time around :)

**chaos Leader**: Duly noted about the journals; they will be used sparingly. And I appreciate your appreciation of "briefing" type material in stories...hopefully this chapter wasn't "too much too quickly" on that front. Thanks for the review chaos.

**The Broken Wolf**: On the subject of Angels...I was going for (and will explain later in the story) a sort of Boondock Saints quality to them, if you're familiar with the movie. They're the sort of people who make bad, but hard to get to, people go away. And as for Falco and Katt; well, I like to think of Falco and Katt as two characters more or less "written for each other." Both are hot-headed, fast-living sorts of people, making their relationship most likely very passionate while it lasted, but just as bitter when it ended. That's my reasoning anyway. Thanks for the review buddy.

**AndrossKenobi**:

**BC: **Thanks for the interest BC!

**RedBay**: No worries RedBay; don't feel like this is a job or anything, haha. First off, like I've said before, I believe I owe you and my readers an apology for not realizing the "oh hey, a story needs a plot" part of writing sooner. Things have been picking up in my drafts so far, hopefully that shows up in the published chapters.

Second, I'm happy to hear Miyu's search seemed nostalgic; that was exactly the feeling I was going for. I was also trying to add some softness to the character whom I made seem probably a little harsh earlier on.

Finally, no, your reviews don't ever bore me. In fact, they're usually full of the best sorts of criticisms and comments. Forgive the patronizing tone of that last sentence, but I mean it earnestly. Part of the idea of a hobby is to get better at it, and feedback is the only way in this particular pastime. I'm glad you've been enjoying the story as long as you have, and that your feedback has shaped a good deal of it. Thanks again Red.

**Tsorfie68**: Glad to hear you like it! Regarding Miyu: yeah, that was a decision I made very early on in writing this; too many stories here are sappy romantic types, which is fine if you're into that, but to me, the Star Fox universe speaks more to action. It's what made the games so good...er, most of them, anyway. Thanks for the reviews!

**Delta**: Welcome man! I've got to say, I'm flattered; that review continues to have a way of making me smile when I read it :) Thanks for the feedback!

**TheFrustrated**: Thanks for the review TF! As I've said before, a review is a review. Yours, like all of them, is greatly appreciated.

In other news, we've reached 100+ reviews! Thank you to everyone who is reading this sentence for reading my story, and an extra bit of thanks to my reviewers; you guys are the best. As always, if anyone feels like saying something, whether pointing out an error or suggesting something that could make the story better, please let me know in a review. All critiques and criticisms are welcome, both harsh and critical, and not.

-IR


	28. Chapter 28: Comfort

**XXVIII: **Comfort

_"The _Osgard_ is off. Like a tiny ittle rocket that's actually a rather large frigate."_

_"Good."_

_"So you really think they're worth hanging on to, Wolf? Fox and company, that is. Not the frigate. The frigate's nice. So nice we got two, I figure."_

_"I do. You were there last year; Fox and his team have a way of pulling victory out of impossible situations. They lack any sort of discipline, but the talent's there. They could very well be the wild card that pulls this out for us."_

_"And what makes you think they'll settle for being the wild card in our grand card game? Something tells me they'll want to play a hand here and there, too."_

_"Fox's reaction when I mentioned Peppy Hare. Their connection is strong enough to take into consideration; he can be controlled by it. And by some strange stroke of luck, it turns out that this 'Peppy' is a key figure in the undercurrent of Bauker's plan."_

_"...We keep Fox on a leash, and he'll pull our sled right to Bauker's puppeteer."_

_"Exactly."

* * *

_

Slippy hurried to keep up with the medical team, waddling down the ramp of the _Great Fox _alongside the rolling stretcher.

He still couldn't believe the mercenaries' home ship could actually fit inside one of the _Lone Wolf_'s twin hangers. Even rushing along with the doctors pushing Linka's comatose form, he took time to appreciate it, craning his neck to take in the cavernous space as he ran. It had been a very snug operation, and the toad was pretty sure he felt some of the paint scrape off of the tips of the _Great _Fox's wings and dorsal fin, but there it was, filling nearly the entire docking bay.

Slippy heard Katt call out to him from the bottom of the ramp, but didn't turn around. He merely lifted a hand over his head and waved. He knew what he was doing. Fox had told him to keep an eye on where Wolf's medical team was taking Linka, just in case. It was an idea he was all too happy to agree with. He had spent the entirety of the last day either at the helm of the _Great Fox_, or struggling to get its damaged systems working again. He could use the break. Besides, he was worried about the coyote lying on the stretcher.

The team progressed out of the hanger and into a maze of corridors. The pair of medics in grey uniforms were almost completely indifferent to the toad, saying nothing and offering nothing in terms of explanation or direction along the way. Occasionally they would take a look at one of the instruments connected to the roller.

The only break in the silence was in a lift, as they ascended into the _Lone Wolf_'s innards.

Slippy stood on the metal plating of the car, shifting periodically from one foot to the other. His breathing was still as fast as it had been while running to keep up with the taller medics, but without anything to spend the oxygen on, it degraded into panting.

He swallowed, noticing the silence for the first time. He glanced at each of the medics in turn, then at Linka, and then back at one of the medics. "Where are you taking her?" he asked, immediately regretting it.

"Med bay," the medic replied, offering no expression or emotion, not even at the obviousness of the question.

"Ah," Slippy responded, unsure of what to say next. "That…that makes sense."

Thankfully, the lift doors parted a few moments later, revealing a sterile, grey and white hallway. The team exited, maneuvering the roller out of the elevator with practiced ease and making their way down the corridor with Slippy in tow.

The short mercenary noticed an increase in foot traffic as they progressed down the hallway, consisting mostly of medical personnel in the same grey uniforms as those pushing Linka. Spotted in among them though, were patients wearing the black or red jumpsuits of various divisions of Wolf's crew, in addition to various bandages and medical apparatuses. Slippy struggled to keep alongside the roller and out of the way of others, eventually giving up and falling in line behind. Along the way, he couldn't help but marvel at the sheer amount of space and equipment compared to the _Great Fox_'s humble single room setup.

"_It's like they have an entire floor dedicated to just medical stuff,_" he thought.

The medics pushed through the swinging doors of an operating room's antechamber and came to a halt. Slippy nearly found his face embedded in the heavy plastic as he brought his mind back from wandering, slipping through at the last second as the doors swung shut behind him.

The room he found himself in was small, containing a bench and room for maybe half a dozen rollers pushed together in parallel. The walls were a dull sort of grey, liked the walls outside in the corridor, but stained dark by continuous washing. Given the medical nature of the room, Slippy tried not to think to hard of _what _they were washing off.

A doctor bust out of a pair of identical swinging doors opposite, wearing a long white coat, trimmed in crimson red. The insignia on his uniform's left chest was the usual red paw print, though with a white circle outlined in the middle of it. Blood stains spattered the lower folds of his coat, blending in with the trimming surprisingly well. A sterile cloth was wrapped over the upper part of his head like a bandana, and a mouth mask hung from his neck. The brown-furred wolf had clearly just come from surgery.

"Just got the orders," he said, weary voice betraying the age his looks did not. "What happened to her?"

Slippy felt the slight urge to retreat under the doctor's questioning gaze, but managed to summon the courage to speak. "G-gunshot wound to the head. Possibly elsewhere. I…I don't know. She was in a gunfight back on-"

"That's good," the doctor interrupted, not gruffly, but with purpose. "She looks stable for now. She's got priority according to Wolf, but there are a few soldiers who are still in critical from the raid. We'll be taking care of them first."

Slippy blinked, not expecting the quick and efficient explanation. "Of course. Thank-"

"Mmhm," the doctor hummed, again cutting Slippy off. He didn't seem like a mean-spirited or rude man for doing so, the toad observed; only busy. "Alright," he continued, speaking to the medics. "Bring her through."

* * *

"So…why am I here again? I've got a faint recollection of me telling y'all that I'm not a fan of action."

"Electronics support; you said you were handy with computers, right? We need someone to grab the data off the freighter's computers. Besides, what else would you be doing on the _Great Fox_? With all due respect, you'd only be getting in Katt and Slippy's way with the repairs."

"Oh, I can think of any number of things with which to occupy my time, Mr. McCloud; 'not getting shot at' being chief among them."

"We're going in first, cleaning a path to the bridge, so you shouldn't need to worry about that."

"Shouldn't. You could've said _won't_, you know. I wouldn't have asked questions."

"Yeah, but then I'd be lying. And lying isn't nice."

"I s'pose…would've made me feel better though."

"Tell you what, you can stay back with Miyu and watch the breach point. That'll free up some of Wolf's boys to help us out. Sound good?"

"Better than the alternative I suppose. …I don't have to get all duded up, do I?"

The frigate _Osgard _spared much in the way of comfort for crew, judging by the empty barracks room Fox and his team had been assigned. Four double bunks lined each wall, framed by empty personal lockers. Doors on either end of the room led to the rest of the ship, and a small washroom, respectively. Florescent light panels dotted the ceiling, giving the room a sterile, sanitized feel. If they hadn't known better, they could have assumed the room had never been used. As it was, they knew the crew of the _Osgard_, like the rest of Wolf O'Donnell's remaining fleet, had been hit hard by the escape from their base. There were plenty of these empty rooms aboard, thanks to the 'Cornerian' Seventh Fleet.

Lying on the table were several suits of combat armor, black and outlined in red in the standard color scheme for Wolf's fleet. They were lighter affairs, containing none of the heavy ceramic or alloy plating of the heavier, powered suits. Instead, the protective clothes were a combination of well-fitting, coverall combat fatigues, with an over suit containing several molded pieces of dense, hardened dura-plast, protecting the vital regions of the torso and abdomen. The lower fatigues also contained some lighter plastics in the upper thighs, ending just above the knee. Common, plastic knee and elbow pads completed the outfit.

Falco lounged on one of the lower bunks, already having found a suit that fit him comfortably enough. It lay in a heap at the end of the bunk, deemed less comfortable than his current, usual flight gear. The cots had no pillows to go with them, so he had his hands behind his head to make up for it, humming a lazy tune. Across from him, Jason sat on one of the upper bunks, legs swinging over the edge like a child. He had yet to change from the brown jacket and blue jeans he had left Shoana in. His eyes swept over the table crowded with armor and weapons, the latter from his shop, before finally settling on Fox.

"Nah," the orange vulpine replied, struggling with a clasp on his shoulder piece. The armor portion of the suit was one piece, made up of several flush subsections, though the shoulders were connected by straps. The end result was protection that didn't increase the wearer's silhouette by much, and still allowed total freedom of movement of the unprotected limps. "Not unless you want to. I mean, they certainly brought us enough."

"Brought us enough what?" Miyu asked, walking through the door from the hallway outside.

The hatch drifted closed on oiled hinges, followed by a _hiss _as the room's ventilation was cut off from the rest of the ship. Standard on most frontline warships, bulkhead segmentation was a practice to prevent any sort of mass decompression due to a hull breach in battle.

"Armor came," Fox replied, finally getting the latch to catch and rolling his shoulders, making sure the padding fit well. "What did the captain have to say?"

"Was he gentle?"

Miyu rolled her eyes, ignoring Falco. "Said he'd provide fighter cover and give us two squads of marines, but only as support. We'd have point on the raid, as ordered by Wolf." She gestured at the table, starting a second thread of the conversation. "So what, find something that fits?"

Fox nodded, "Yep. Guess they got some female marines to hand over some spares; they're at the end." Miyu hummed a happy note and strode towards the end of the table as he continued. "Two squads, nothing else?"

"Nope," Miyu responded, reaching the pile of clothes kept separate from the rest and beginning to sift through them. "Good thing Jason's here, 'cause he said they couldn't risk putting tech guys outside the frigate during boarding. I guess after the Cornerian raid there's…only a handful…left…"

The lynx paused. Her feline muzzle frowned and her eyes narrowed as she turned her head rapidly between the two unfolded suits in front of her. "Um…what the hell is this?"

"Hm?" Fox intoned, cocking his head to the side.

Miyu held up the armor from one pile and stared at him, her eyes burning with both curiosity and annoyance.

In one hand she held the torso section of the suit. It looked exactly like the one Fox had just managed to figure out, except that it abruptly ended just past the halfway point. Its neckline was scooped well below Fox's as well, dipping almost below the chest. Indeed, the majority of the material seemed to be concentrated along the sides and ribcage. In the other hand was what looked like a pair of abbreviated armored shorts, barely containing the detached plastics of the standard trousers.

And that was it.

The room was quiet.

"Is…is this a joke?" Miyu asked, laughing once nervously but stopping.

"Hey, allows better range of movement, right?" Falco said from his bunk, smirking at the lynx.

Miyu looked at him, then down at what could accurately be described as armored undergarments, then at Fox. Her expression was quickly losing any sense of humor.

Fox shrugged, adjusting another strap on his far more practical armor, keeping his eyes off her. "They're like that in holo-vids for a reason, you know."

Miyu's eyes didn't leave him, though her eyebrows shot up as she made her point. "But…but this is bullshit," she said, holding the bits of armor up and shaking them for emphasis. When Fox didn't look at her, she waited until he did, and shook them again. "Where's the protection? What the hell do I do in a firefight? _Flash _them?"

The room was silent for a moment, though Miyu could've sworn she heard Jason make a noise up in his bunk. When nobody offered anything else, she sighed, dropping the clothes to the table and idly playing with them. "Give me some friggin' heels while you're at it; damn," she mumbled.

Another noise jerked her head towards Jason. The grey fox had fallen back on the bunk, his legs still dangling over the edge, and sounded very much like he was trying suppress something. She quickly looked at Fox, whose solid expression was beginning to crack. He was still trying to keep busy on his armor strap, but a grin was rapidly starting appear across his muzzle. Miyu's eyes started narrowing again, just as Falco let out a whoop of mirth from his bunk.

The room erupted, all three of them breaking into laughter at once.

"I'm sorry!" Jason insisted through cackles, still hidden by his bunk, "Oh god I'm so sorry, they made me!"

Miyu glanced rapidly between the three of them, comprehending the joke but still waiting for what she wanted. She felt a tap on her shoulder, and turned to accept the offered bundle of missing clothes Jason was offering her. They had been hidden up on his bunk. She accepted them as her frown finally gave way to a reluctant smile.

"You guys suck," she said, grin robbing the statement of too much ill intent as she spread the two halves of armor out on the table and began reassembling them with the pieces Jason gave her.

"We should have waited until she put 'em on," Falco quipped, still laughing.

"You," Miyu responded with a smirk, pointing at him but keeping her eyes on the task on the table. "You would have regretted that."

The pieces snapped together with little difficulty as the room died down. After assembling the protective layer, Miyu took the under-layer of fatigues into the washroom to change. A few more moments passed before anyone could speak again.

"But no Jason," Fox began, still chuckling a bit, but recalling where his conversation had left off. "You'll sit tight at the breach site until we get to the freighter's bridge. Then we'll call back and you'll come up with Miyu."

"Mm," Miyu said, coming back out of the washroom. Her new clothes, like those worn by Fox and buried somewhere in Falco's pile, bore a resemblance to the under layer an athlete might wear on a cold day. The black fatigues were a little tight, but looked like they fit well enough. "Thanks for putting me back on guard duty Fox; poor little girl like me might not know what to do with a big scary gun."

Fox looked at her as she began putting on the top layer of the armor. "Now…admittedly, I'm not in the best position to be speaking after that joke, but it's nothing like that," he insisted. He paused a moment to gather his words. "It's just that we're doing this for Peppy, you know? If Falco or I get hurt, so be it, but it wouldn't be right for you to get shot or killed over it. No more than it would Jason."

As Falco made a noise of agreement, Miyu met his eyes and nodded, rocking her head from side to side a little in a gesture of acknowledgment. That made sense.

"I mean, trust me," the mercenary continued, reaching into the bag of Jason's weapons they had taken from the _Great Fox _before boarding the _Osgard_. He fished around for a second before pulling out a shotgun by its barrel. "Under any other circumstance, if I could give you a chance to get a rifle stock to the head or something, I'd be all for it." He smirked at her and chuckled again. "I owe you that much."

Jason blinked at the statement, and glanced over at Miyu. She was shimmying into the over layer of her armor, trying to get it to sit right. He wasn't sure what he expected her reaction to Fox's statement to be, but he certainly didn't expect the smile he saw.

With a quiet noise of accomplishment, she got the torso armor to fit. The lynx pawed the collar briefly, making sure it was a sure thing. Grabbing the lower armor off the table, she bent down and easily donned it, fastening it in place. Aside from being slimmer in size, and the obvious alterations around the upper torso, it was no different than the suit Fox was wearing.

"_Like it should be in those stupid movies," _she thought.

"Fair enough," she agreed, shrugging and returning the smirk. She tugged on one of the shoulder straps, having the same problem Fox had a minute ago. "Jeez; the soldiers here must have _massive _shoulders or something."

Jason looked up, squinting his eyes before looking towards the opposite end of the table at Fox. "You guys have the weirdest friendship, you know that?"

The rest of the room's occupants chuckled.

"Oh, it's actually quite a sweet story; you'll never guess how these two crazy kids met," Falco said, propping himself up on his elbows and looking at the grey fox. "No, seriously. Try."

Jason was about to take the avian up on his offer when the heavy steel door of the room was pulled open. The conversation died as everyone turned their heads towards the newcomer. He stepped through the hatchway with purpose, coming to stop once over the lip.

The jackal was dressed in the same armor as the mercenaries, right down to the fatigues underneath. And yet the identical clothes looked like they somehow fit better on him. The only difference on the jackal's armor was a series of chevrons emblazed on the shoulder, just above the blood paw emblem of Wolf's forces. The soldier's thin, gaunt face seemed hardened, and his eyes glowed with the sort of watchfulness that comes from looking through crosshairs for a living.

"Who is McCloud?" he said, folding his hands behind his back. His voice had the deep edge of a drill sergeant.

Fox put down his shotgun and raised his voice. "I am."

"My name is Gamma Crendon," the marine nodded and turned towards the vulpine. "But you may call me Gamma. I'll be commanding the marines who've been assigned to you for this raid. My Alpha has ordered me to follow your commands for the extent of the mission."

"Good to know Gamma," Fox replied, finding the soldier's impeccable posture somehow making him stand straighter himself. "I appreciate your help."

The Gamma nodded, accepting the thanks but making no other show of it. "I know that you and your crew have Lord O'Donnell's respect, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. You won't receive any less from me." He paused, and Fox smiled. The vulpine was about to offer further thanks when the marine spoke up again. "However, don't think that I'll allow you to needlessly risk the lives of my men. If you haven't noticed, we've been to Sol and back recently. If I don't agree with a command, I will intervene. Understand?"

Fox's smiled faded a bit, but didn't disappear. "I do."

"Good," the jackal replied, unfolding his arms. "We're expected to make contact within the hour. The ready room is at the end of the hall." Then, without waiting for a response, the man left, letting the door swing shut behind him and leaving the mercenaries alone again.

* * *

"_I wish this picture was bigger_," she thought, holding the old fashioned locket between her thumb and forefinger as she walked down the sidewalk. The tiny, hinged holder was a dull, golden color, and just about the size of a thumbnail. Though small, the heart-shaped piece of metal was warm to the touch._"…And ideally not a picture at all."_

A thin smile peaked its way through the longing etched across her face as she briefly imagined holding a tiny, locket-sized version of Bill in her hand.

Sophia Arkanian let the locket fall back into her on its chain before pulling her parka tighter around her. The streets of Akro that evening seemed colder than most, though with winter just around the corner, it was hardly unusual. Snow was falling, just enough drifting from above to accumulate on the concrete around her. She passed very few people on her way back to her apartment, and those she did had the same hunched, hurried pace as she, trying to spend as little time outside in the cold as possible. The frosted glass of the shops and storefront businesses slid by blocks at a time, melting into the background as her trek home stretched on.

She sniffed, wrinkling her canine snout in the thin air and narrowing her hazel eyes. The fine, light chestnut fur that covered the exposed portions of her face was standing on end, straining in the prickly cold. Her ears, normally tall and alert were hunkered down like her tail, seeking refuge from the chill against the rest of her body.

It had been like this for three weeks now, ever since she got the notice in a base wide alert that fateful morning. Three Cornerian fighter pilots had betrayed and killed the rest of their squadron during an escort mission in Sector X, working with criminals to hijack the freighters they were supposed to be protecting.

It had been mildly troubling news until Sophia saw the pictures of the supposed traitors.

The next day, still reeling from the idea that her beloved fiancé was a traitor to the very government they both had pledged loyalty to, she received a message at her workstation on the base from a stranger. The message was about a series of nonsensical events and happenings, none of which Sophia had any recollection of being a part of. She was about to delete it and chalk it up as a wrong address, when she noticed the underlying theme of the stories.

They bore a striking resemblance to the coded messages Bill had used to send her while stationed on Katina. She used to suppress a squeal of delight every time one of his mysterious messages had appeared in her inbox, knowing she had a night of love letter decoding in store after her duty schedule was up. It was the only way they could communicate; intra-military romance was forbidden under a certain number of service years.

Desperate for answers, Sophia took a chance and decoded the message using the format her and her lover had established. It was him. He was alive. Her joy had been tempered by reading on, learning that while safe for the time being with his old mercenary friends, the bounty on him and his surviving squadron-mates was official, if in error. His message insisted that it was far too long of a story to explain, but there was no way to clear his name. For the time being, he would be on the run, and in hiding.

Soon after, her old friend Jason Mierse had contacted her, again in code, and told her that he would be checking in on her from time to time, and that she should take some time off from the base. She thought about it and figured the logic in laying low for awhile was sound; anyone going after the bounty on Bill would find her if they really wanted to. Especially if she were working out in the open.

Ever since then, this was her routine; trying to enjoy her time off from military work while knowing that her love was on the hit list of every bounty hunter in Lylat.

A bag slung around her shoulder bumped into her thigh with every step, filled with enough groceries to last her another few days. One of the few things keeping her sane was the tiny kitchen her temporary apartment was furnished with, allowing her to continue her favorite pastime even in her self-imposed exile, and even while worried sick on a daily basis. Before, whenever Bill and her could find time together, a good portion of it was usually dedicated to cooking, more to his benefit than Sophia's. She didn't mind being relegated to the kitchen though; it was a hobby she genuinely enjoyed, and Bill usually found ways to make himself useful.

Another thin smile began spreading across her lips as she reminisced about their last weekend off together, a little over three months ago. Remembering those times was a double-edged sword given her circumstances. Sometimes it was all that was keeping her going, but there was no way to escape the subsequent fall of realizing just how dangerous their predicament was. At any given moment, there was no way for her to know if he was still free, or still alive.

Likewise, there was no way for her to know anything about her _own _safety. She found herself glancing over her shoulder at every noise, keeping track of everyone around her during the few times a week she left the relative safety of her apartment. A girl once outgoing and eager to make strangers smile, she found herself adjusting to her new life with disappointing success.

As if reading her mind, her immediate surroundings abruptly lit up as though from a spotlight. At the same time, the hiss of tires on freshly powdered concrete permeated the air.

She looked up, realizing with a sudden pit in her stomach that a car was fast approaching her from the street. The pit turned to ice when she saw nobody else on the sidewalk to call for help.

The headlights flared to a sun's brightness, and her vision faded into snowy white.

* * *

Sophia woke with a start, out of breath and drenched in sweat.

She swallowed, feeling the steel bite of the tracking collar around her neck as she struggled to get her breathing back to normal in the darkness of the room. There were no windows to tell the time naturally, nor clocks to tell it artificially, but she knew it was the middle of the night. It wasn't the first time the same dream had interrupted her sleep.

Over a week had passed since she was picked up on the streets of Akro, grabbed and thrown into a car by two men in masks. She remembered very little about the subsequent journey, quickly losing track of the turns the car took and unable to see the streets from the bottom of the passenger cabin. At one point, after what seemed like hours, she recalled being picked up and transferred to a building, taken through a few doors and hallways until she was unceremoniously tossed into a room barely large enough for a bed.

The tiny, concrete enclosure had been her home ever since then. The cot was old and well worn, and squeaked whenever she shifted in her sleep. In addition to the regular dreaming, it kept her in a constant state of sleep depravation. Her eyes had taken on a sunken, desperate glaze, and they flitted about the room during her waking hours. Her ears shifted with them, straining to pick up every noise she could.

All she ever heard was the conversations of the guards outside her door. Together with the few times she was allowed to walk outside her room, she managed to glean a few scarce details about her surroundings, and the men responsible for her kidnapping.

The facility was an abandoned warehouse, judging by the state of the large open space she took her meals in. It was covered in a fine layer of dust, and occupied by a scattering of old boxes and wooden shipping pallets. She was blindfolded whenever moving between the two rooms, but along the way she could always sense the odd mustiness of the hallways she walked through. In the week she had been there, she got the sense that her captors hadn't been there much longer.

Sophia's captors themselves were still a mystery to her, though she had worked out that they were some sort of mercenary group. Based on the number of unique voices she heard over meals and stationed on guard duty outside her door, she guessed their number to be around a dozen or so. She had heard the names 'Black Star' and 'Blood Tip' mentioned a few times, but had no way of knowing which one they were, if either.

The first few days had been a blur, full of questions she didn't have the answers to, and interrogations she tried hard to forget. It wasn't long before they came to the truthful conclusion that she had no idea where Bill or any of the others wanted on his bounty listing were. It was the one little victory she held on to, knowing that as painful as her complete separation from Bill had been, it had paid off in the end. But even after they had stopped coming for her, her mind reeled and her body ached; she knew that if she could find a mirror to look into, she wouldn't recognize herself.

The pitch black of the room closed in on her eyes, and her head fell back onto pillowless cot. A tear welled in the pit of her eye as she stared at the ceiling, growing until gravity sent it streaking down her cheek.

"I don't know how much longer…" she whispered, needing to hear someone's voice, if only her own. She blinked away the next tear, but was unable to stem the stream of salty liquid falling from her eyes.

Images of her lover floated through the darkness that flooded the room, tormenting the young fiancé with impossible visions of safety. She knew she wouldn't be able to keep her charade of nonchalance up in front of her captors much longer. The dreams were becoming more and more frequent, and the reality of waking up more and more jolting and harsh.

Sophia turned to her side, curling her legs to her chest and closing her eyes. The room she lay in was always warm, surrounded by solid walls without anywhere for the heat to escape. The sheets they gave her were thin, but held her body heat surprisingly well.

And yet, she always felt cold.

A rustle of keys outside the door drew her attention, and she was suddenly bathed in the fluorescent light of the hallway outside.

She turned towards the illumination, blinded by its sudden appearance. This wasn't right. Her internal clock was certainly off due to the utter lack of any way to tell the time of day, but she had eaten just before going to sleep. And there was no other reason they ever took her out of her room anymore.

Unless they were starting again.

A silhouette stepped in front of the light and into her room, reaching towards her with a gloved hand.

"Get up," his gruff voice commanded, grabbing her arm and dragging her out of the cot.

She fell to the concrete floor with a suppressed yip, her ragged shirt and jeans from the day she was abducted doing little against the concrete. She pushed herself to her knees, but not quick enough for the masked man, still enshrouded in the blinding light from the hallway.

"I said _move_," he growled, pulling her to her feet by the ripped collar of her shit and pushing her towards the door. As he did, she saw the flash of light off of something metal in his other hand.

"What-" she began, stumbling drunkenly into the corridor. The thin fur and padding on her feet did little to keep out the chill of the floor outside her room, and she suddenly wanted almost nothing more than to crawl back into the imagined safety of her little home for the past week.

"We're moving you," he said simply, stepping into the hallway after her and yanking the door shut behind him.

She winced even as the word left her muzzle. "Where-," she began before the metal object in his hand rushed up to meet her as he cuffed her across the face.

"Don't ask questions," he said sternly over the ringing in her ears. He grabbed her shirt again, shoving her in front of him and pushing her along.

They only got past a few other doors before a gunshot rang out a little distance away, though definitely somewhere near the warehouse. The man stiffened and stopped as the first shot was almost immediately followed by a series of similar shots in rapid succession, sounding slightly closer. Glancing behind him, the man pushed Sophia ahead and continued on away from the direction of the noise, now including frantic shouting. His pace had quickened, forcing Sophia to stumble, still half-blind, into a trot.

Up ahead, another guard wandered into view from an adjoining hallway. He was dressed similar to Sophia's custodian, covered in black, heavy winter clothes and a black cloth mask. Identical to every other guard she had seen.

"Yould," her rouser said, loud enough for the new guard to hear.

When he did, the newcomer looked towards the two of them with surprise. The man quickly looked around before settling on them again.

"Are you deaf Yould?" the first man shouted, waving at the second with his free hand, holding what turned out to be a pistol. "Get over here. Aren't you supposed to be on patrol?"

The man called Yould waited for a moment more before jogging over, gripping the rifle slung around his shoulder in both hands. Sophia blinked rapidly in the light, still getting her bearings but able to see the second man approaching.

"Nevermind. Give me that, and take her to the vehicle pool," the first said when Yould was close enough, gesturing with his pistol to the rifle. "I'll meet you there. Don't stop for anyone. I don't know where those Blood Tip bastards came from, but they could be in the warehouse already."

Yould looked around again, hesitating as he slowly unslung the rifle. When another pair of guards came jogging around the corner, he seemed to snap out of a daze and complied with the first guard's demand. Yould took the pistol in exchange, holding it tightly as his superior checked the automatic weapon.

Satisfied, Sophia's guard shoved her towards Yould, whistling for the other two guards who had just rounded the corner and gesturing for them to follow him as he dashed off towards the sound of gunfire.

The prisoner tripped into her new captor, bracing herself for a fall to the rough floor or a clout that never came. Instead, Yould caught her neatly by the shoulders, absorbing her forward momentum. The weary canine blinked again in the harsh light, peering up at him but unable to make anything out. His eyes were black circles, shadowed by the rest of his mask.

Another pair of guards came running around the corner, and Yould suddenly stood straight, grabbing her arm and pushing her in front of him. They continued in the direction the first guard had previously been moving her, down the hallway in the opposite direction everyone seemed to be rushing. Other guards sprinted past, checking their weapons as more gunfire erupted from the same area as before.

Sophia was beginning to wake up a little more, her vision starting to clear, but everything seemed new to her. The corridor was much colder than her room, and the staccato bark of guns going off began pumping her flight reflex. She wanted her cot. She wanted the pretend safety of her cramped little room. Not this hallway. Not this faceless guard leading her by the arm.

They reached a dead end intersection and Yould froze. He glanced down each of the branching corridors, looking unsure of which direction to take.

Sophia hung her head, her shoulders hunched. Another tear began forming, causing her eyes to glisten in the hallway light. Even with the physical presence of the guard's hand around her arm, she felt so utterly alone, so forgotten about. Her mind began spinning, past the point she had normally been able to suppress during the past two weeks of captivity. She just wanted to go home. She just wanted to feel safe again.

She just wanted to see him one more time.

A tear coalesced, falling to the concrete floor with a sparkle.

"William…" she whispered, not caring if the guard heard.

She suddenly felt his eyes on her as the name of her love left her lips, staring at her even as she stared at the ground. They stood there for what could have been a second, or an hour. She didn't care anymore. His breathing became louder in the silence of the hallway for a moment, as though he were suddenly afraid of something.

Then another series of gunshots caught his attention, and he pulled her down one of the passages, apparently having made up his mind on which direction to go.

They passed more doors as she shuffled along just behind him, present in body but worlds away in spirit. Her shoulder began to hurt, dragged as she was by the guard, but she didn't care anymore.

"_I hope you're safe, my love," _she thought, feeling a distinct draft as Yould pulled her towards the exit of the building. _"Wherever you are…"

* * *

_

"Are you sure this is it?" Bill asked, the stinging winter wind whipping at his exposed face. He ducked back behind the snow bank, putting his back to the mound and glancing over at his partner. "It looks like it's been abandoned for awhile, and we passed quite a few of these old places. That guard could have come from anywhere."

Rhena stared at the isolated warehouse another moment longer, imagining how it would look from above, before joining Bill below the snow bank. The natural rampart ran the length of the field they had trekked to, splitting a space open enough to see a distance, but with enough trees and bushes to make for decent cover. The darkened facility on the other side of the field was still a hundred meters or so away, barely visible in the dark of the night, but there was no point in exposing their position, just in case someone happened to be looking their direction for some reason.

"Positive," she replied firmly over the whistle of the wind, "Basser's computer had a whole dossier about this place, a good portion of it concentrating on how empty it looked." A single braid of red and orange hair found its way outside her hood, lashing across her face with every gust of snow.

"Alright then," Bill said, nodding as he drew his pistol. Crouching there in the snow, he examined the weapon one more time, making sure it was in working order.

"Sir…Bill," Rhena began, her sigh unheard in the noisy weather. "Are you sure you don't want to wait for an opportunity? Charging in headfirst seems like a bad idea given our lack of intelligence."

"I know," he admitted, looking at her. He pushed himself through the snow between them, coming closer to make himself heard over the wind. "But I can't wait any more. We could stake this place out for a week without finding anything useful. If she's in there…I need to get her out. It's as simple as that."

"Doesn't mean you should give up tactics…" she trailed off, noticing the desperation in his eyes as he watched her.

"I know," Bill replied, "I don't plan to. But Rhena, _you_ don't have to be here you know. There's no reason you should have come and put yourself out-"

"Sir, I know what I'm doing," she cut him off. It could have been the stinging of the wind in his eyes, but Bill could have sworn he saw a tiny smirk across the wolf's lips. "I have my reasons for being here, and that's enough."

Bill looked at her. Emotions were beginning to spill over inside him with the possibility of being reunited with his fiancé a reality. He saw it in himself, the way his hands had begun shaking, even before they began their trek though the cold, past the outskirts of Akro. He could feel the heat of it building in his chest, some insubstantial source warming him from within. But even in all that, he found a part of himself realizing just how much Rhena was risking by following him on his venture.

It made him smile as he pulled off his jacket, the subsequent lack of a hood revealing his flopped ears, dyed deep red. Rhena dropped her hood as well, revealing her sharp, lupine ears colored the same way. Bill motioned her way as he struggled out of his coat, and she reached behind her, pulling the body of a Black Star operative into view with a grunt of exertion.

* * *

Yould's pace quickened as the chill of the winter winds deepened, and suddenly they were outside.

Sophia let her eyes open all the way for the first time, no longer stricken by the overwhelming fluorescent lighting of the warehouse corridor. The guard had led her to a side entrance to the facility, lit only by a few dim, exterior lamps.

The winter night was covered with a fine layer of snow, and harassed by a sharp, billowing wind. Sophia's feet crunched the powder beneath them, quickly becoming numb to the all penetrating cold. The darkness outside the small bubble of light thrown off by the dim lamps was thick, enshrouding the world around them. Walls of concrete, cracked with age, rose high enough to be unable to see over, further encapsulating the tiny, nearly empty motor pool.

Yould dragged her over to a small tarp, tied loosely on top of something and cracking in the wind. With on hand still gripping her arm firmly, he pocketed his pistol and set about undoing the various knots and fastenings. His glove seemed clumsy, and it quickly became apparent that he wouldn't be able to free the tarp with one hand. Looking quickly from the tarp to his prisoner, he hesitated again before letting go of her.

"Don't move," he said sternly, though perhaps due to the wind, it came out more as a request then a demand. He glanced at the tracking collar around her neck, having apparently forgotten she was wearing one at some point. Watching the chestnut canine for a moment to make sure she didn't dash off, he then turned back to his work, making much more progress now with both hands free.

As he did, Sophia somehow managed to stay upright. The wind whipped at her face and her short, dirty hair, cutting through her clothes with little impedance. The cold was so total, so penetrating; even beyond the physical toll on her body. She felt sick again, like so many nights before in the past month. Not nauseous, nor ill; just so unbearably cold. When the guard had let go of her, she briefly entertained a thought of running for it, but quickly dismissed it. She had no idea where she was, and would probably die of exposure in less than an hour. She found herself wishing to return to her little room more than a chance at freedom.

More gunshots, still closer than before, rang out, causing Yould to stop. He had almost gotten the tarp untied, and the part that had been was peeled aside, revealing a two person snowmobile underneath. The masked guard looked past Sophia, into the night in the direction the shots had come from. For a moment, the wind was all that was heard. Sophia began to shiver.

With a flurry of movement, he returned to his job and finally freed the tarp. Letting it blow aside, he grabbed the keys, sitting on the dash of the snowmobile, and plugged them in. With a firm turn, he ignited the vehicle's engine. It choked to life with a hearty cough, fading quickly to a high pitched whine as the motor caught. Satisfied with the idling ride, he stepped backwards, and turned towards the sound of gunfire.

Sophia watched him with largely indifferent eyes, already beginning to turn red in the biting cold. She took an instinctive step back when he pulled out his pistol again, her heart catching in her throat for a second as it looked like he was leveling it at her.

Instead though, he pointed it toward the dark sky. Waiting for a lull in the staccato cracks, he added his own weapon's bark to the cacophony. He fired three times quickly, followed by a sequence of two shots, followed by a single discharge. At the first burst, Sophia briefly snapped out of her stupor and ducked, covering her ears from the unexpected noise. As the other shots rang out though, she managed to open her eyes, and realized what he was doing.

In response, frantic shouts sounded from somewhere off in the distance, and a tremendous burst of fire picked up where the silence had briefly reigned.

Sophia looked back at Yould, watching as he observed the top of the concrete wall just behind her with increasing impatience. And despite the fact that she was still in his field of vision, she saw him glancing sporadically down at her, too, as if checking to make sure she wasn't trying anything.

A new noise caught Sophia's attention, and she spun around to face the same wall.

With a rustle of clothes and weaponry, a figure vaulted the wall with a grunt, flying through the air and landing just beside her with a heavy thump, boots muffled by the snow. The figure landed too close though, and Sophia tripped on her numb feet, and fell backwards with a yelp.

As the figure stood, Sophia stared up at it from the snow covered ground, illuminated by the facing light.

The wolf's black muzzle poured steam as she huffed to catch her breath, glancing quickly at Sophia on the ground before looking back at Yould. Her eyes were focused and sure, in direct contrast to her hair, wild and disheveled. The red and orange locks settled all around her head, though not obscuring the crimson coloring of her ears. Lifting an automatic rifle, she trotted over to Yould and exchanged a few curt words. What exactly was said, Sophia had no idea, still terrified by the newcomer's sudden appearance, but she caught the general gist of it. They had to leave. Quickly.

As the wolf trained her weapon on the wall she had just come from, Yould approached Sophia again, grabbing at something on his coat. It was only when he got right up to her that she realized he was grabbing for the zipper.

She pushed herself away from him as he approached, inching backward on her hands and tail until her back came up against the rough stone of the wall. And as she did, the guard just took another step forward, then another. There was no escaping him.

But when he stood over her, he did something the canine never could have expected.

Finding the fastening to his coat, he wriggled out of it and gathered it in his hand, offering it to her. At the same time, he extended his free hand to her as well.

Sophia stared back at him, still partially trying to push herself away even as the wall refused to yield. This wasn't right. She eyed him with suspicion, like a primitive animal being offered food from a scientist.

"Sophia, I need you to come with me now," Yould said, the tone of his voice hurried, but soft. It was a tone she hadn't heard for a long time; not since she had been taken prisoner, at least.

But still, this was just another guard, trying to get her to come along with the least resistance possible. They had tricked her before, and she had no intention of falling for it again.

Her gaze switched from fear to defiance, and she shook her head. It was slow and unsure at first, but the motion quickly gained confidence. She had been toyed with too much. If they wanted to knock her out and carry her away, so be it. But she was too tired and cold to go along willingly.

The voices were getting closer. The fire-haired woman was starting to get anxious.

"Please," Yould beseeched, stepping a little closer. Sophia tried to slide further back in response, but was again met with the unyielding wall. The fact that he had used such a word confused her though. She stopped shaking her head, and just watched him for a moment. Her eyes searched his hidden face for some betrayal of his intentions, but all that stared back were the shadowed eyes and black cloth. The harsh winter wind continued to blow.

He knelt down, dropping the coat and reaching for his mask.

"Soap," he said, nearly whispering, "Please, I need you to do this for me now."

"_Soap?"_ she thought, eyes widening. _"Nobody calls me that but…"_

Yould's fingers snatched the cloth over his head and pulled it off, revealing a face that had taken far too long to arrive.

Bill's eyes watered in the wind, and his cheeks flushed red with the cold, matching the red dye coloring his ears. His hair was matted with sweat despite the temperature. The mask fell to the snow.

Sophia's heart skipped. The wind suddenly muted itself, and the chill in her skin abruptly went away. The world around her slowed to half speed, and for a moment, it seemed like it stopped altogether. All she could hear was the beating of her heart.

She reached a hand forward, trembling towards his face in the silent wind. The fiancé was afraid. What if she touched him and he disappeared, fading into the black night? What if she woke up again? It wouldn't be the first time it had happened.

But it was real. Her fingertips brushed his chin, feeling the short fur standing on end in the freezing cold. Her palm fell flush with his cheek, absorbing the warmth of his smile. There was no faint feeling of sheets over her body, no sudden realization that she was about to wake up. He lightly placed his hand over hers, pressing it into his cheek with the slightest pressure.

She searched his face for something, _anything_ that could answer her unspoken question. Watching her hazel eyes wash over him, he guessed what she needed to know. Closing his eyes, he nodded once before opening them again. Yes. This was real. _He _was real.

"…William?"

"Sir…" the fire-haired woman warned, raising her rifle to her eye and lowering to a knee. Sophia heard her voice above the deafening silence, but it was muffled.

Bill gently gripped Sophia's hand with his and rose, pulling her to her bare feet. He handed her his jacket from the ground, which she took readily. She donned it slowly, moving as if in a daze.

Flashes of gunfire splashed across Sophia's face as the wolf began firing her weapon in short, controlled bursts. The retort of the rifle was a series of hollow thuds to her, as was the sound of a body falling down the opposite side of the wall.

Willing her feet forward, she allowed herself to be pulled towards the waiting snowmobile. The snow around them jumped up in tiny fountains as someone began blindly firing over the wall. In slow motion, the bits of frozen water, much of it melted with the friction of a bullet's impact, rose like miniature geysers, peaking before falling slowly back down to earth.

Her heartbeat began speeding up, and she felt things around her following suit.

Bill jumped into the front of the snowmobile's bench, yelling directions at both women behind him. His hands began twisting the handlebars of the machine, revving the engine for a quick acceleration.

Sophia didn't hear what he said to her, but by now her mind was operating on pure, animalistic instinct. The burn of her frozen feet didn't bother the canine anymore, nor did the invasive cold as it snaked through the tears in her jeans.

She jumped onto the snowmobile behind her love, sliding up to him and wrapping her arms under his and around his chest. She felt the weight of the fire-haired woman crushing into her back as the wolf jumped on last, facing the opposite way and digging her boots into the foot wells. The way the wolf braced herself for the vehicle's acceleration in turn pushed Sophia further into Bill, but she didn't care.

Sophia held on with everything she had as the snowmobile lurched forward, the high-pitched whine of the motor becoming the catalyst to her hearing returning to normal.

The bark of the fire-haired woman's rifle didn't come into the equation though, even as she covered the three's vehicle from more guards. The humming of the snowmobile's engine faded once again into white noise.

Her fingers dug into Bill's undershirt as she pulled herself closer, willing herself to be absorbed into the muscles of his back. She rested her cheek against him, squeezing him with her arms, half to make sure she didn't fall during his evasive maneuvering, half to make sure he wasn't going anywhere either.

His scent somehow found its way to her nose despite the wind, bringing back every memory of him all at once. She breathed deep as her ear pressed against him. The pounding of her beating heart was suddenly joined by that of another.

The coat he gave her was heavy, but did little to keep the cold rush of air from snaring her exposed face and feet. But Sophia didn't care.

For the first time in an eternity, she was warm.

* * *

A/N:

Story time!

I went to the movies a little while ago with a friend, and one of the previews that came up was for the movie SuckerPunch. It's since come out in theaters, and from what I hear, it is an epic movie. For those who haven't heard about it, and glazing over any plot details, it features several young women in absurdly awesome combat situations. Sword-swinging, gun-toting, I think I saw a 'mech or two...the works. And of course, they were dressed in all sorts of attractive outfits.

After the preview that afternoon, and while the various concession snacks were a-dancing across the movie screen proclaiming their deliciousness, my friend turns to me and made a comment about how utterly impractical the various female protagonists' clothes were in the preview. She insisted that the heels they wore are entirely uncomfortable, and would make horrible shoes to fight in. Likewise, while in movies male soldiers and fighters charge into battle with badass armor, girls always wear unarmored, tight little get-ups that offer little, if any, protection.

"Look at actual real world soldiers," she told me, "The women look exactly like the men, because that just makes sense. That's how it should be in movies."

I tend to agree. Nothing wrong with showing a little style or skin during a fight, but with Hollywood, it's usually to a pretty ridiculous level.

So yeah, if anyone was wondering where Miyu's situation in this chapter stems from...that was it :)

Anyway, off the soapbox, on to the reviews:

**Wanderling:** I'm afraid I can't confirm nor deny whose words those were :) Falco and Leon were similar to Fox and Wolf in the game Star Fox 64, if you haven't played it; rivals. Their 'relationship' is based on what I remember from the dialogue of that game (Falco was brash, Leon was...interesting). Thanks for the review!

**chaos Leader: **Yeah, I realize that's how Wolf tends to be portrayed, and with good reason. The recent games suggest he'd be more of a gruff type. However, in writing this story, I wanted to explore what it means to be a mercenary. Who says who is on the wrong side of a war? Nobody ever thinks of themselves as the bad guy, but too often the villain of a story is portrayed as such a ridiculously evil antagonist. So what if I made Wolf an entirely reasonable character? He's still got relatively heartless convictions (one's ability = one's worth), and a certain level of arrogance, but he's not just a thug. Of course this is all just my feelings on the character, but I thought it was a version worth exploring.

The remark about pacing and structure is a good one; I'll make sure to keep it in mind in the future. As always, thanks for the review cL.

**RedBay**: Heheh, Wolf's eyes. A friend of mine on this site wrote me a message specifically naming my coloring of his eyes as wrong, and provided the correct coloring. Thus the fix. And as for the other comments about Wolf, refer to my response to cL's review. He won't always have that air; the team just happened to meet him in a moment of thought and planning. After all, he had just found a hideout from the Cornerians, right? In regards to Bill and Rhena's excursion, its true that Rhena seems to be the less emotional of the two, but she left just as quickly and impulsively as Bill. And if Basser wouldn't have shown himself as a threat in the bar, why would she have needed to act?

With Basser, I was hoping to illustrate someone who had literally just realized that a golden egg had fallen into their lap. He might be improvising, and not planning everything out perfectly. Maybe he thought that Bill already had suspicions about him, so by admitting to who he was, he could win some trust. And as for the info, Bill and Rhena aren't mercenaries. As former military pilots, they don't have those immediate connections to any underground networks like an information broker like Basser would. Finally, I intended for the locals to be annoyed by, but mostly indifferent to Basser. Same goes for their attitude towards Bill and Rhena.

Anyway, that's just my take on things. My apologies if that was a little long-winded :) Thanks again for the review Redbay.

**XXXXXX**: Thanks X! Glad you're enjoying the story.

Thanks to all my readers for sticking with the story, even through all the delays that tend to crop up. This hobby is something that helps keep me sane, and I appreciate all of your comments, reviews, and views from the bottom of my heart.

-Irish Redd


	29. Chapter 29: Transient

**XXIX: **Transient

Somewhere in the void between Fortuna and Katina, a long, cargo laden freighter cruised through open space.

The vessel was accompanied by a trio of escorts, dagger shaped fighter craft that drifted around the transport as they continued along. They moved like a planetary system, smaller entities sticking close to the larger ship in the center. All four were branded with the blue and white insignia of Blue Arrow Shipping, a blue arrow facing up overlaid atop a white circle.

Their presence was typical for an interplanetary freighter. Most commercial shipping firms made it a policy to steer clear of troubled regions of space unless absolutely vital, and even then the route was laid out only with additional security escorts in mind. But for an open space burn like the transport's current run, a light fighter escort was enough to deter any would-be opportunist hijackers. The trio of snubfighters wouldn't be a match for any sort of organized attempt on the vessel, but then if that were the case, there was little even the most conservative minded of security coordinators could realistically prepare for.

Still, despite the isolation of their position, it wasn't uncommon to pass other interplanetary freighters and convoys on their way from one station to another. Shipping firms and independent traders were prevalent in that particular sector of space, running trade routes around the triangle of Katina, Corneria, and Fortuna, as well as the numerous stations in between. So when the navigator of the Blue Arrow freighter _Transient_ picked up what appeared to be another freighter's radar signature approaching their general vicinity at cruise speed, he didn't raise any immediate alarms.

He was less indifferent, however, when that single radar signature abruptly split into three, and the transponder for the largest of them changed from a freighter to that of a known warlord ship.

* * *

"Dusk Flight away," Gamma Crendon reported, holding the com set attached to the jackal's right ear. "The _Transient_'s distress beacon is active. EMP blast in four, freighter contact in five. Stand by McCloud."

Fox nodded in response, shifting in place and adjusting the grip on his weapon. The silver combat shotgun had come from Jason's stash of guns, carried over from the _Great Fox_ after boarding one of Wolf's frigates, the _Osgard_. Fox's own pistol was strapped to his right hip, with a small pouch of spare shells and ammunition attached to the other. Wolf's men had been kind enough to give each of the mercenaries a small allowance of grenades as well, though their use would be limited in the freighter, given the potential risk of an explosion breaking a window or damaged piece of the exterior hull.

Fox's armor felt solid and stable as he shifted his weight, a nice change from the street clothes he and his team typically wore during contracts that involved ground work. In the tight corridors of a freighter, it only took the blink of an eye to miss an ambush from behind a bulkhead, and while the armor Wolf's men had offered him and his team wasn't impervious, it felt much better than nothing.

His ears, poking through the holes atop the light, dura-plast helmet, perked in surprise as his vision flashed, and he felt someone rap on the head covering. He turned and saw Falco standing behind him with a smirk, lowering his submachine gun.

"You always did think too much with your head."

Both Falco and Miyu were stacked up behind Fox, decked out in nearly identical suits of black armor, trimmed in red with the insignia of Wolf's soldiers on the shoulder. The only exception was Falco's helmet, which was conspicuously absent in contrast to Fox and Miyu's. He had said before that a helmet was too constrictive, and that in the confines of a freighter, nobody would go for headshots anyway.

Falco's smirk turned into a wince as Miyu's submachine gun tapped his bare scalp, probably a bit harder than was necessary for the joke. The lynx offered a fake grin in response to Falco's halfhearted glare back at her, quickly letting her expression drop back to a somber seriousness when he turned back around.

Behind Miyu, Fox could hear the nervous breathing of Jason, clutching a pistol and trying to get himself to relax.

The small room they occupied was shared with, and mostly taken up by, a half dozen of Wolf's marines, split into two groups of three. One group, led by the same Gamma who was apparently the commanding officer for the soldiers, was dressed in the same light armor as Fox and his team, and armed with similar weapons. Their load out, like Star Fox's, was clearly biased towards mobility and speed.

The other squad, however, seemed equipped to take the opposite approach. Adorned with various scars from battle and sprayed on insignias and symbols, the soldiers were fully encased in heavy, powered armor. A series of interlocking plates of what looked like some steel and ceramic material covered every inch of the marine's bodies, save the joints, where the powerful hydraulics that responded to the soldier's movements, as well as some partially exposed wires, were mostly hidden by simple black sleeves.

Their helmets normally differed depending on the species of the suit wearer, but in this instance, all three were clearly lupine, their sharp muzzles prominent, predatory eyes shielded behind tinted plastic eyepieces. Whenever one of them shifted, everyone could hear the quiet _whir _of various motors activating, as well as the solid metal thud of their steel boots on the deck. Their weapons looked like exaggerated rifles, though they were connected to a bulky pack worn on their suits' backs by a pliable cord. Fox had never seen such a weapon's discharge before, but part of him was eager to witness it. Taking up the space and a half of their more lightly armored compatriots, the three formed an intimidating wall in front of the _Osgard's _breaching room.

Another part of Fox wished that he could be in the dogfight Wolf's Dusk Flight was undoubtedly engaged in; he always did feel more comfortable in a cockpit than outside it. But he knew that he didn't trust the retrieval of Peppy's whereabouts with anyone else. While Wolf seemed to have genuinely carried through on Fox's request so far, there was still something nagging at the vulpine about the whole situation. Perhaps some residual wariness from their encounter during the Lylat War. Fox reasoned that if Wolf really wanted him dead, he wouldn't still be alive at this point, but he couldn't shake the feeling entirely.

Falco's voice caught his attention.

"Hey Jason, how long are you gonna need?"

"You'll be fine, you'll be fine, you'll be fine…" came a mumbled response. Jason's head snapped up, eyes wide, torn from whatever mental safety place he was trying to keep himself in. "Hm?"

Falco laughed. "Take it easy man; you'll scare the kitty. Now when we get to the bridge of this boat, how long are you going to need to get our info?"

"Oh," Jason replied, gaining his bearings. "Right. Um…well, if we ignored efficiency and just did a full database dump, probably around a half hour or so."

"Right," Fox said, turning around and joining the conversation. "So, seeing as we're not doing _that_, how long would it take for you to find any videos or records of Peppy?"

"Two minutes," Crendon called out. His marines checked their weapons one last time, muttering status reports and grim jokes to each other.

"Well that's the problem Fox; they're not exactly gonna label their tapes 'Station where we dropped off the prisoner' are they? It might take some rooting around in their records, some ah…_creative_ database mining, if you will."

"Translation?" Falco quipped.

Jason sighed. "Won't be able to tell you 'til I get there, I'm afraid."

"Great. Hey Gamma, I don't suppose we could take some of your walking tanks with us to the bridge, could we?"

The armored jackal turned towards the avian from his men, giving him a deadpan stare. The soldiers in the full armor shifted their stances too, staring Falco down with their angled, harsh looking eyes. The stomp of their boots rang through the small space, vibrating up into the legs of the mercenaries.

Falco stopped and the room became quiet as a low tension slowly filled the air. For a moment, for some reason, he flashed back to the first time he was caught shoplifting candy as a kid.

"Our Heavy Troopers are entry security only, _Zate_. They'll stay here."

Another moment passed, and while the faces of the heavy troopers were entirely concealed, Falco thought he could see the smirks beneath their helmets. He could certainly see them on the others.

The Gamma huffed, turning back towards his men, resuming his final orders.

"_Zate?_" Falco questioned under his breath, acting as though he wasn't fazed, but keeping his voice down anyway.

"Zeta," Jason answered, equally quietly, leaning closer. "Probably a low rank, based on what I've heard of their ranking system so far."

"Fighter cover has been neutralized," the Gamma reported suddenly, halting any further conversation as he pushed his earpiece. "As soon as Dusk Flight brings down the freighter's shields, we'll launch the EMP. Prepare for breach. I want to be in and out before any local patrols get wind of the _Transient'_s distress call." He glanced briefly at Falco before turning to Fox. "Are you and your ladies ready, McCloud?"

* * *

He opened his eyes.

The brief thought that he didn't remember his bed being so much like the floor flashed through his mind before a thunderclap rattled through his quarters, shaking pictures on the wall and causing a few to fall.

The stout husky struggled to push himself to his feet, even as the small room around him slowly began to stop vibrating. He glanced at his waist-high cot with its sheets in disarray, reasoning that whatever had caused the freighter's structural quake had undoubtedly thrown him from his sleep and dumped him onto the deck plating. His captain's uniform, so neatly laid out on a chair a few hours ago, lay in a heap at his feet, next to the overturned seat itself.

'_Did we hit something_?'

A tinny, frantic little voice was calling at him from somewhere, and it took a moment to realize that it was from the wall com next to the door.

Stepping over to it, he jabbed the call button.

"Calm down Lieutenant," he said, rubbing a fresh bruise on his head. "What happened?"

"Sir!" the voice said urgently, "We're being boarded. It's Warlord O'Donnell. We need you on the bridge, _now_!"

"On my way," the captain replied, suddenly wide awake and jumping back to his uniform, throwing the jacket on over his undershirt. It would have to do for now.

Slapping the door controls, he dashed from his room, sprinting down the corridors of his freighter as fast as his stubby legs could take him.

He had been boarded by pirates before; it was a sad fact to state, which reflected the continued neglect of an outstanding public issue, but any mercantile officer who had served as long as he had in the Lylat System could say the same. But that wasn't why he was hurrying this time.

Before leaving Yohan Depot back at the beginning of the _Transient_'s cargo route, the Blue Arrow CEO had contacted the captain personally, informing him of a special condition involved in this particular mission. It had seemed odd at first, but like most business-related hoops he had to jump through, he didn't think much of it.

The captain would have a heavily armed escort detail up to a certain point in his route, which wasn't too surprising. Blue Arrow often shipped large amounts of valuables for private companies, who often offered to supplement Blue Arrow's security forces with their own ships. They would usually accompany the freighter in question until the delivery was complete, at which point the freighter would continue on its scheduled journey, and the private security would break off. A transport still had to finish the rest of its rounds, after all.

However, the CEO had given clear instructions that, in the event of a boarding, the captain was to erase the freighter's entire database, something prohibited by interplanetary law. Pirates had no use for most of the records anyway, and government officials used the data to keep track of tax and tariff information. In some extreme cases, eliminating the records of where a freighter docked and when was something tantamount to corporate fraud for a shipping company.

The captain had been given a code that he alone knew, to enter into the system to execute the sweep should the need arise. He had no idea why such an action was needed; he had looked over the cargo manifest for his freighter, and found nothing of particular interest on the list that a pirate would be interested in. Just some labeling irregularities. But he accepted the order without question, like he always had. He had made quite a career out of Blue Arrow, and it made no sense to question what he was sure was probably barely a misdemeanor in the grand scheme of things anyway.

The captain rounded a corner and met up with a pair of his security team, huffing as he began to run out of breath. Sadly, years of captaining an interplanetary freighter left little time for physical exercise, evidenced by the burn he was already feeling as his legs pushed onward. He was in the hallway that ran just inside the outer bulkhead of the _Transient_, dotted with windows at regular intervals to showcase the blackness of space.

As the captain glanced at them, however, he noticed that instead of the normal field of stars, the portholes were entirely filled by what looked like the plating of another ship. He could see the rivets holding the sheets of armor in place.

In the hull of his own ship, next to one of the portholes, he also noticed a small hole, just large enough for the small, metal cylinder that had just fallen through.

He stopped.

That was odd.

* * *

The metal bulkhead peeled away like a perforated piece of cardboard as the heavy troopers of Gamma Crendon's boarding party charged through. Their steel boots pounded like a blacksmith's hammer, their footfalls clanging through the entry way into the freighter beyond. A thick shroud of smoke blanketed the immediate vicinity thanks to the plasma torches used to slice through the transport's outer hull, hiding any visual observation from those left in the breaching room of the _Osgard_. However, the sounds of combat were enough to fill in the gaps the lack of visual input left.

The sound of staccato small arms fire punctuated the halted clanging of the heavy troopers and the hissing of their powerful hydraulics. Bullets pinged off of the bulkheads of the ship, and the resilient armor plating of Wolf's soldiers. Cries of panic and retreat could be barely discerned amongst the gunfire, clearly coming from some sort of security force within the transport who had just realized what they were up against.

Strangely enough though, Fox couldn't make out any return volleys from the cacophony of sound.

Then Wolf's armored soldiers opened fire.

Every blast from their heavy rifles felt like a punch to the chest to the vulpine, rattling his bones as the pressure waves struck him again and again. Though he couldn't actually see what sort of havoc the weapons were wreaking, Fox couldn't help but wonder how the _Transient_'s bulkheads were even holding up to such an onslaught, much less the security forces within them. It sounded like every blast threatened to puncture the hull, venting the entire entry corridor into the vacuum.

Finally though, the sounds abruptly ended, and a strange silence reigned in the breaching room.

Fox heard Falco whisper a curse of amazement from behind him. "Glad they're on our side."

The clanging of heavy boots resumed, though much more slowly and deliberate than before. A few moments later, they stopped again.

"All clear," a voice called through the smoke, clearly from the external speakers of one of the heavy trooper's suits.

"Move out," Gamma Crendon commanded, leading the remaining pair of Wolf's troopers, more lightly armored than their frontline counterparts. They disappeared into the smoke that still separated the _Osgard _from the _Transient_, though it was beginning to clear.

"Wait for the call," Fox said, turning behind him and speaking to Miyu and Jason.

After receiving positive responses from both, he glanced at Falco and motioned with his head towards the breach. Tucking the stock of his shotgun into his shoulder, he nimbly hopped over the jagged threshold, and entered the Blue Arrow freighter, the avian close behind.

For a moment, the vulpine found himself swimming through a sea of fog, blurring outlines and diffusing the sterile lights of the freighter's hallway. A shadow coalesced towards one side of the cloud though, and he jogged towards it.

After a few steps, the smoke thinned and disappeared, revealing the Gamma and his troops circled around him. Off to the side, a couple bodies dressed in the uniforms of the freighter's security team, as well as a shorter man in a captain's jacket, lay in a heap, their thin armor failing to protect them from the boarding party's superior weapons. Those same weapons scorched the otherwise clean, metal bulkheads of the corridor, dirty black streaks marring the pristine walls. The trio of heavy soldiers were arrayed facing outward, scanning the corridor's connecting hallways for further Blue Arrow security forces, while the Gamma and the two remaining men stood close together, waiting for the mercenaries.

Upon seeing them, the Gamma spoke up.

"Our EMP should have knocked out most of the freighter's boarding defense systems," he reported, "As well as a good deal of their surveilence equipment. Anything on this ship still powered is running off of backup generators, and those will be mostly tied up with life support, so we shouldn't encounter much electronic trouble. At least not for as long as we should be on this boat."

"Great," Fox replied, glancing at a digital map of the freighter's internal layout, displayed on the small monitor attached to his forearm. "Let's make this fast then."

"My thoughts exactly," the Gamma agreed with a grim expression. He turned to his men, the three heavy troopers and the pair of less armored huskies. "Delta Heavy, hold the breach site, report any activity. Lemarc, Aush, you're on me." Tucking his weapon, the jackal turned back to the mercenary. "Lead on, McCloud."

Fox nodded, noting which hallway to take on his mini map and starting off at a jog with Falco close behind. Further back he could hear the clanging footfalls of the heavy troopers repositioning, and the lighter steps of Crendon's squad following him. Fox couldn't help but smile, realizing for the first time just how much firepower he had at his disposal for the mission. Combined with the armor he wore, he was feeling extremely confident about the results he expected to come away from the _Transient _with.

At least until the first slug winged off his chest plate.

Instinctively diving forward, Fox cleared the four way intersection he had been crossing on his belly and quickly scrambled to his knees, taking cover on the opposite side hugging the wall. Falco slid past him, having just entered the junction when the bullets started flying past and making a running leap. Opposite them in the direction they had just come from, the Gamma's squad stopped short of the intersection, stacking up along the hallway wall.

Fox risked sticking his head around the corner, noting the security forces were only a stone's throw away, advancing in a fast crouch before fire forced him to duck back. He glanced at Crendon, his sensitive ears still ringing from a near miss.

The Gamma motioned for the mercenaries to continue on; the soldiers would stay and cover their rear.

Giving an affirmative hand signal, Fox scrambled to his feet and continued on, Falco close behind. A few moments later, the hallway behind them erupted in return fire as Wolf's soldiers opened up.

After passing another cross corridor without incident, they reached the main artery of the freighter, a doublewide hallway that ran from bridge to engine block, almost without obstruction.

Luckily for the mercenaries, several chokepoints dotted the length of the passage where it had narrowed to a single doorway, compliments of the freighter's hull partitions. The partitions broke the passage down to manageable twenty meter sections, each capped on both sides by a thick bulkhead and a door that no longer automatically locked due to the _Osgard_'s EMP.

The side corridor had dumped the pair into the middle of one of these sections. Carefully checking both directions to make sure it was clear, Fox stepped out into the open and jogged towards the door leading closer to the bridge. Falco followed suit, stepping to the left of the door and grabbing the heavy manual handle while Fox put his back against the bulkhead to the right.

They locked eyes, and counted silently to three.

With a grimace of exertion, Falco yanked the heavy door open, allowing Fox to swing in and level his weapon to his eye in one fluid motion.

Time slowed.

In the next section, Fox saw three men, clustered only five meters away. Apparently they had been discussing something, as none of them looked prepared to fight. Fox caught the final words of their conversation.

"…the captain hasn't checked-"

As soon as they saw the vulpine, two men ducked and dove for the walls on either side, while the middle reached for his sidearm.

Fox's shotgun barked once, sending the middle guard sprawling to the deck amidst a thin cloud of red.

Pumping the quick action weapon, the ejected shell hadn't even reached halfway to the floor before Fox retargeted, sidestepping to the left while still moving forward, and lining up the closest Blue Arrow in his sights.

The man had no weapon.

Fox's finger vibrated but didn't commit, and he averted his shotgun to the right, where the last man already had a pistol aimed at him.

Both weapons fired at the same time, and both combatants fell. Fox's momentum sent him sliding forward on his side, while the security officer slammed back against the wall before crumpling to the ground.

A quick burst from Falco's submachine gun announced his entry into the fray, finishing off the wounded Blue Arrow. He then flipped his attention to the unarmed man, whose hands jumped into the air when the avian turned his weapon towards him. They stared at each other for a moment.

Fox groaned from the floor, flipping himself on his back with enough speed to indicate to Falco that he was alright. Propping himself up on his elbows, the mercenary got to his feet, apparently having been hurt more in the fall than due to a bullet, thanks to a fresh dent in the armor over his chest.

Seeing his friend stand up, Falco's intensity dropped a notch, and he stepped forward, lowering his weapon and motioning for the man to stand as well. Turning him around, Falco grabbed the back of his uniform and pushed the unarmed man against the wall. The avian did a quick pat down before grabbing the man's shoulder and spinning him around to speak to him face to face. He made sure to stand uncomfortably close while he spoke, driving his point home.

"We've got friends coming up behind us; stay visible, don't try anything stupid, and you'll get out of this alive. Got it?"

The man nodded, clearly shaken that he had just saw two of his fellow employees shot in front of him, but with enough presence of mind to comply.

"Good."

Fox pumped his weapon again, sending another empty shell clinking to the deck and calling Falco's attention back to the mission.

The pair of mercenaries collected the weapons of the fallen security guards, grabbing their ammunition clips and leaving the guns behind. The surviving Blue Arrow didn't look like he was in any mood to turn on Fox and Falco when their attention was drawn in a different direction, but it made no sense to allow him the opportunity. And taking the weapons themselves would slow them down.

Bending down to retrieve the last clip from one of the bodies, Fox noticed a piece of laminate pinned to and largely hidden beneath the guard's vest, reflecting the lowered backup lights of the corridor. Slipping the ammunition from the guard's belt into his own pocket, Fox touched the clear material, sliding it out from behind the cloth to reveal it as a security badge. The guard's picture was prominent, as well as the rank of 'Sergeant,' but what caught Fox's attention the most was the barcode that ran along the bottom edge of the card, along with the phrase 'Level One Security'.

'_This might come in handy,' _he thought, pocketing the badge as well before jogging to join Falco at the door to the next hallway segment. Along the way, he reached into his hip pouch and grabbed a pair of shotgun shells, loading them into his weapon's ammo tube one at a time.

Once there, the mercenaries lined up against the door as they had before, with Falco grabbing the door handle. This time though, instead of readying his shotgun, Fox plucked one of the grenades on his belt, pulling the pin free but squeezing the clip shut for the moment.

Chances were if there were guards on the other side of the door, they had heard the gunfire and were prepared for the mercenaries to storm in. Therefore, another tactic was called for.

Fox nodded to Falco, and made sure to stand clear of the doorway. With another heave, the avian hauled the heavy door open, the construction groaning on metal hinges.

Before he had even pulled it all the way open, a gunshot rang out from the other side, and a slug pinged off the steel door. The bullet ricocheted back and forth down the section of the hallway the mercenaries occupied, finally losing momentum at the far end and skittering to a stop on the deck.

Fox popped the clip on the explosive, cooking it for a few moments before slipping the grenade through the open entry and ducking back to ready his shotgun. A cry went up from the other side, just before the characteristic _bang _of an explosive's shockwave contained by walls shot through the ship. The shrapnel clattered to a halt a second later.

Without waiting further, Fox stepped into the room in a crouch, swinging his weapon rapidly from side to side but unable to spot any targets. Falco entered immediately after.

The middle of the section of hallway was covered with debris caused by the grenade. A pair of bodies lay slumped around a small shipping container hastily pushed to the middle of the floor, the box having caved in by the force of the explosion. In the relatively tight confines of the room, the shrapnel in particular was devastating: despite apparently landing in front of their cover, the grenade still managed to account for both guards behind it.

Advancing to the container, Fox waited until checking behind it before relaxing. As Falco serviced the guards' weapons, removing their ammunition, the vulpine checked his map, noting their location relative to the bridge.

"We should be close," he said, tapping the small screen to zoom in. "Past the next door is the last section before the bridge." He then touched his ear piece, speaking into the thin microphone that extended halfway down his muzzle. "Gamma, we're almost to the bridge; what's your status?"

"On our way," the Gamma responded after a short burst of static. "The path up is secure for your tech to advance. My men will wait halfway between the breach and you and escort him up."

"Roger," Fox replied. "Appreciated Gamma. Miyu, bring Jason and hook up with Wolf's men."

"Got it," the lynx's voice came through.

* * *

Miyu tapped off her microphone and looked at Jason, across from her in the _Osgard_'s breach room. His face barely contained a nervous dread, his eyes meeting hers with a clear urge to be somewhere else, preferably far, far away. One hand was wrapped tightly around the pistol he had taken from his own stash of weapons, while the other rested on a satchel of electronic tools that hung over his shoulder. The grey fur on his face was starting to dampen with perspiration, and his breathing was short and shallow.

He offered Miyu a thin smile.

"You know, for someone who sells weapons, you seem awful nervous about potentially using them," she noted, searching her submachine gun for the safety and tabbing it off. Looking back at Jason, she motioned with her head for him to follow.

"Yeah, 'cause I haven't heard that one before," he replied sourly. He slipped a thumb under his shoulder bag and lifted the strap over his head to the opposite side, securing it across his chest. "It's not so much the 'using them' part; it's the 'other people using them on me' part."

"Well it's strange, that's all I'm saying," she stated as she stepped over the jagged lip of the entry point, and into the _Transient_. "Not to mention you were trained as a soldier, right? I mean, I know you're not front line, but you're still-"

"Okay, I _get _it," Jason cut her off as he followed. "Let's just get this over with. Why the hell am I even here…"

The trio of heavy troopers on the other side regarded them briefly as they stepped through, but quickly returned to watching their sectors of the entry point. One of them raised a plated, gloved hand and caught their attention, waving them over to his particular hallway. The sound of hydraulics and metal lightly scrapping on metal accompanied his motions as the mercenaries trotted over.

"This way," he said, his voice sterilized by the external speakers of his suit. The trooper then gestured down the corridor with his weapon, pointing out the path his commander and Fox and Falco had taken.

Nodding in understanding, Miyu started off down the designated hallway at a jog, Jason trailing just behind her and to the side.

They followed the corridor for a little ways, stopping before each adjoining hallway and carefully making sure they were empty of any straggling Blue Arrow guards. At the first intersection, they ran across spent shell casings and other visible signs of skirmishes, but otherwise their journey to the center of the _Transient _was uneventful.

At the point where their corridor joined the central artery of the freighter, Miyu and Jason spotted one of Wolf's soldiers crouching at the wall. The armored marine was apparently communicating with another solider within the artery proper, with one gloved hand flashing signals and the other firmly gripping the handle of his assault rifle. The fact that he was engaged in silent communication seemed to suggest that he had just been or would soon be in combat. He seemed unaware of the mercenaries approaching him from behind.

Miyu slowed to a quiet creep, unsure of how to announce her presence, and wanting to make sure she didn't startle the marine into thinking the freighter's security had flanked them from behind. She searched her mind but was unable to come up with any sort of universal 'we're on your team' phrases.

The marine, and the mouth of the hallway, was only ten meters or so away when she settled on clearing her throat.

"Er, don't shoot," she added, standing up right and trying to look as nonthreatening as possible.

Her first indication that she made a mistake was when Jason jumped close behind her in a way that seemed like he was diving for cover.

Her second was when the lightly armored soldier cursed, almost before she realized he had turned around and leveled his weapon at her.

"Guh; for the love of god, merc," he breathed, lowering the weapon. He continued to grumble to himself as Miyu and Jason approached, the latter having come out from behind the lynx. "How the hell did you survive this long pulling that shit? Mommy ever teach you not to sneak up on friendlies like that?"

"I said 'don't shoot,'" Miyu retorted, now just a few feet from the solider. She kept her voice low because the marine was, though she wasn't sure why given that she hadn't heard any of the usual noise of combat recently. As close as she was, she could see the named 'Lemarc' stenciled in white on the soldier's black, red-trimmed chest plate.

"Yeah. Except what do you think the first thing an enemy trying to take you alive would say?"

"Screw you," she replied with a sneer, waving his criticism away. "What's going on here? Which way to the bridge?"

"That way," Lemarc whispered, jerking his thumb down the main corridor in the direction Fox and Falco had taken a few minutes earlier. "But you're not going that way yet because we've got company coming from_ that_ way." He turned his hand to point in the opposite direction. He smirked and gestured to Jason. "Or at least, your techie friend isn't going down that way; it'd put him right in their field of fire. You can feel free to though."

Miyu rolled her eyes and said nothing, save a choice curse or two for the husky. Instead, she leaned out from the side corridor into the larger one, and took stock of the situation herself.

The subsection of the wider, main hallway was capped at both ends by bulkheads, each with a heavy steel door in the middle. The doors in both directions were open, though from the side corridor, Miyu couldn't see much through either of them. Flattened against the bulkhead in the opposite direction of bridge was another of the Gamma's soldiers, standing in a crouch with both hands occupied by what looked like grenades. When he spotted the lynx looking at him, he lifted a finger to his mouth, an indication to be quiet. He then pointed down the artery through the door whose wall he was hiding behind.

Miyu stopped to listen for a moment, her ears straining to pick up any noise beyond the background humming of the freighter's backup generators. For awhile there was nothing, but gradually, she could pick up the soft footfalls of approaching security forces. It made sense to her why Lemarc had told them to stay put; when all the doors of the artery were open and one stood in the doorway, one could see all the way from the bridge to the engine block. However, anyone hiding just inside a hallway partition would be invisible.

"Alright; so what's the plan?" she asked, ducking back into the side hallway.

"Wait until they get into the adjoining partition, chuck some grenades in, and close the door on them. It won't lock, but they'll think twice about coming through it." He looked at her. "Then we break for the bridge and hook up with the Gamma and your buddies. This whole causeway is littered with side hallways, and the bridge is a dead end, so it's more defensible."

"What're you doing here then? Seems like a bad place to hole up."

"It is. We were coming back to meet you when we heard a gunshot. Think one of the guards doesn't know how to use a gun and misfired. The security guys on these freighters are always all sorts of green. So we stayed and set up the trap."

"Fair enough. Where do I help?"

"You don't. Sit right there and shut up."

Miyu's eyes narrowed and she looked like she was about to make a comment, when Lemarc suddenly turned and peered around the corner of the hallway. He raised his weapon to his eye and made a quick hand gesture to the other soldier at the doorway.

From behind her, Jason leaned closer and whispered, "I like this guy's plan."

Miyu huffed quietly but did as she was told, and stood still, though she poked her head into the hallway anyway to observe.

The other marine tensed, inching silently closer to the lip of the door. He carefully transferred both grenades to one of his hands, spreading his fingers to grip them. With his free hand, he looped a finger through each of the spring-loaded safety rings and pulled them loose, arming the explosives.

However, one of the rings popped free with more force than expected, and jumped from the solider's hand. He bobbled with it for a second, mindful of the now live explosives he was holding, before it finally eluded him and fell to the deck, pinging loudly against the metal floor in the silent hallway.

A shout sounded from the adjoining partition, and abruptly the element of surprise was gone. Bullets began streaming through the door, even though the security guards presumably couldn't see anyone there.

"Aush, throw 'em!" Lemarc shouted, and his compatriot complied, blindly tossing the grenades into the next partition. As the marine reached in to close the door, which unfortunately opened into the next partition, he stopped and quickly ducked back.

A Blue Arrow security guard rushed boldly through the threshold, jumping into their partition to avoid the grenades and opening fire wildly. Aush couldn't reach his weapon in time, and instead delivered a vicious kick to the guard's side, sending him sprawling to the floor even as he took several of Lemarc's bullets to the chest.

A moment later, the grenades detonated in rapid succession, briefly drowning out the other audible confusions of battle.

"Move!" Lemarc shouted, grabbing Miyu by the collar of her armor and pushing her towards the door in the opposite direction, leading towards the freighter's bridge. He returned his attention to the process of covering their exodus.

Firing in short, controlled bursts, his magazine managed to hold out until Aush could retreat, hugging the far wall as much as he could. Both marines rose to a walking crouch and began backing up towards the door Miyu and Jason were running towards, spacing their weapons' bursts of fire to cover each other and ensure there was a constant stream of lead pinning the Blue Arrow guards down.

Miyu was first through the hatchway, jumping inside and quickly sweeping the subsection to ensure it was clear. Jason slipped in close behind, breathing harder than he normally would for a quick sprint of the sort he just took.

As though they had practiced that exact maneuver, Lemarc and Aush smoothly backpedaled into the subsection behind the mercenaries, still laying down cover fire as they went. Just as both of their weapons began giving off the characteristic _click _of an empty magazine, they crossed the threshold into safety. Lemarc swung his weapon over his shoulder and grabbed the door, leaning back and pulling it shut with both hands. It fell into place with a heavy _thunk_, and it seemed as though the freighter around them abruptly settled.

"That oughta hold them," Lemarc said, satisfied with his work. He wiped his brow and reached behind him, grabbing his weapon and bringing it back around front, though he now gripped it in a much more relaxed posture. "I swear, freighter guards never get any smarter."

Miyu glanced back at him for a moment, perplexed by his statement.

"I thought you guys didn't make a habit of raiding private freighters," she said, recalling Wolf's earlier speech about the subject.

"Well sure, not as much as we should be," the marine admitted, the four of them progressing in the direction of the bridge at a comfortable walk. Unlike the one they just left, none of the subsequent partitions sprouted any open hallways to be wary of; only hatchways, which were all closed. Aush walked backward, keeping an eye on the door they had just shut. "But c'mon; these guys are easy pickings. We'd be stupid _not _to help ourselves if they have something we needed."

Miyu mentally cocked her head. _'Then why'd Wolf tell us he never raided commercial transports?' _she thought, suddenly getting an odd, ancy feeling in her stomach.

"Er, that'd make sense, I s'pose," Jason filled in for the lynx while she remained silent, lost in thought.

"And see, _that_'s why I like you," Lemarc replied, smiling a wide, toothy canine grin at the vulpine mercenary.

The group of four proceeded through another couple subsections of the freighter's main hallway, passing a few dead guards which had been neatly pushed out of cover into the open, but little else of note. A few partitions later they reached the _Transient's _bridge. There they encountered a slightly larger door than those they had been passing through, flanked on one side by an elaborate security pad. The hatch was open, allowing the quartet to see through into the bridge, and further out into a framed vista of space through the front viewports.

Miyu put a finger to her ear, concerned at the lack of movement. "Fox, we're outside the bridge."

A beat of silence passed before they heard his reply from within the room itself.

"Yeah, come on in," he called, though he remained hidden from view. His voice sounded strained.

The lynx led the way, followed closely by Jason as they stepped through the threshold and onto the bridge. Lemarc and Aush remained outside, taking up defensive positions within the partition in case of further counterattacks from the remaining security force.

The bridge was relatively small for such a large freighter. The floor space was enough for perhaps a dozen or so people to stand comfortably, though standard operation clearly utilized a third of that in crew. Considering the entrance as the back, the front and sides of the bridge were lined with instruments and monitors, grouped by function into discernable navigator's, helmsman's, and communications stations. Above each bank of instruments was a continuous viewport, stretching around the room like a 'U', though it filled out to nearly the entire wall along the helmsman's station in front.

In front of each of the stations was a chair, unoccupied. For a brief moment, Miyu wondered what had happened to their occupants, but the line of bodies along the inside wall answered her question. Propped up against the bulkhead, they were watched over by the barrel of Falco's weapon as he paced in front of them, all three of the uniformed crewmen having chosen to give up without a fight. It made sense to the lynx as she continued to scan the room; a stray slug could easily cause grave damage to the controls housed in the room, and neither party wanted to risk that. Plus, while none of the weapons present in the room could have realistically punctured the high grade viewport material, when the bridge crew were threatened with guns, analytic thought probably fell fairly low on their totem pole of considerations.

Gamma Crendon stood by the navigator's station, his weapon held loosely in his hands. The jackal's armor sported some fresh scoring, but his eyes told Miyu he was as combat ready as ever as he watched the mercenaries enter. He had probably been watching the door before Miyu made her call.

"Glad you made it," Fox said from behind the pair. He offered a slight smile as they turned to face him, leaning against the inside wall opposite Falco and the prisoners. The way he shifted his weight brought Miyu's attention to a white strip of gauze wrapped around his thigh, just under the armor there. His smile turned into a smirk as he caught her line of sight. "Ricochet," he explained, shrugging. "Nothing serious. Just gonna be sore for a couple days."

"Jason, the navigator's station over there should have what we're looking for," Fox went on, motioning towards Crendon. The other vulpine nodded and unslung his pack, walking over towards the appropriate chair. "The Gamma's been kind enough to get things started while we waited for you."

"Never was much for computers," Crendon growled as Jason approached. "I'll watch the corridor with my men. Go ahead and jack in, techie; time is survival."

Jason took the chair and removed a pair of devices from his pack as the Gamma left the bridge. The first device, a black, card-like data chip, slid into a receptacle on the second, a boxier object with a standardized cord jutting out from one end. The cord's head plugged cleanly into the matching port of the navigator's computer, causing the connected drive to audibly whir to life. A small, foreign looking progress bar popped up on the navigator's console, filling slowly but steadily as the device worked.

By the time it finished filling, Falco was beginning to lose his negligible amount of patience.

"Great, are we done then?" the avian asked once he heard Jason's breath of accomplishment, glancing over his shoulder from watching the crewmen.

"Not quite," the fox replied, "I just got into the mineshaft; we've still gotta find the gold."

Falco sighed. "Always a metaphor with this guy…"

Fox hobbled over to stand behind Jason, peering over his shoulder at the stream of information scrolling by in response to his fingertips. Far from the practical and graphically appealing method of operation the console usually offered, the characters streaming down the screen were simple white text on black background. They were all of the same language Fox was used to, but the way they flowed and what they represented lent themselves to some hidden code.

Jason sensed the other vulpine standing above him, and guessed what he was thinking. "I found a command prompt," he explained, sounding much more comfortable than mere moments before in the corridors of the ship. "Whoever initially programmed this console put a secondary link here to the _Transient_'s main memory banks for some purpose and must've forgotten to take it out. It bypasses the ship's navigation interface and cuts straight to the juicy, 'query and answer' portion of the database. Probably looks like Macbethian insurance language to you, but it makes things quite a bit easier on my end."

Despite his pain, Fox managed a short laugh. "Jason, did I sense some smugness there?"

Jason grinned. "Probably."

"Hey, nothing wrong with smugness when you know you're right," Falco commented, softly kicking the leg of one of the prisoners who was muttering something to himself. "Ain't that right, tough guy."

"Alright," Jason continued, like a craftsman who had just finished laying out his tools and was eager to get to work. "You wanted records of unusual cargo displacement, yeah?"

Fox nodded. "Anything that makes it look like something was unloaded that wasn't supposed to be. Do freighters get weighed for mass at any point?"

"Sure do," Jason nodded. "Before and after they leave port for tariff reasons. Docking tolls. That sorta thing."

"Is there any way to check if the _Transient_'s difference in cargo mass doesn't match up with what's reported as offloaded? A freeport might not check for that sort of inconsistency."

"…Should be. Gimme a sec."

After some more furious typing, Jason's screen was cut in half, with one side showing a list of numbers, the other a list of items from the ship's 'offloads' records. Both foxes scanned the columns closely, Jason putting out a finger to the screen to help himself mentally link columns.

Meanwhile, from outside the bridge, a pair of gunshots cracked through the corridor, signaling the arrival of the security forces. There was no call for assistance though, so Fox assumed Wolf's soldiers had the situation under control. Jason jumped a little though, momentarily distracted by the staccato din.

"There!" Fox half shouted, pointing to a row. "A single palette of low grade sidearms was offloaded at Hrakness Station outside of Sector Y, but the weight difference is enough for twenty."

"Could be our stop," Jason nodded thoughtfully. "Certainly shows something under the table is going on there. But unless your friend weighs considerably more than your average hare, I doubt he was only thing offloaded. To be honest, I'm not sure the difference of single person's mass would be flagged as strange."

"It's a lead though. Can you bring up surveillance of any sort for that stop?"

"Maybe."

"See if you can."

"You ladies need anything else besides time in there?" Crendon barked, calling into the bridge between weapon discharges. "We might as well take over the ship at this point. There isn't going to be anyone left by the time you-"

A cry cut the Gamma off, causing him to swear. Miyu couldn't tell for sure, but it sounded like the shout of pain was from Lemarc.

"Miyu, go help them out," Fox commanded, turning briefly towards her before looking back at Jason's screen.

The lynx fought the urge to tell Fox to shove it, remembering that that part of her was a side she was trying – quite successfully – to correct. Instead, she focused on the tactical reasons behind the request and complied, jogging out to the corridor. She surprised herself both at how easily the initial, angry urge had come to her, and then again how easily she had been able to suppress it. It was a sign of progress to be sure, but also a reminder of the nature that had been ingrained into her during her last few years alone.

Just as Miyu left, a window opened on Jason's screen, depicted a grainy, low resolution version of the _Transient_'s cargo ramp, taken from a camera within the cargo bay itself.

"Got it," Jason announced, tapping a few more keys. The soundless video began speeding up, indicated by a small speed multiplier in the bottom corner of the screen increasing.

For a few moments, despite the added speed of the playback, nothing happened in the image of the cargo bay. Occasionally, a shadow or two would pass by underneath the extended ramp, due to the angle of the camera, but no bodies ever accompanied them on screen. Finally though, a cargo bot danced its way to the top of the ramp from somewhere within the _Transient's _hold. The bipedal machine's slow, normally heavy gait was depicted as a comic shuffle by the playback's speed as it pushed a wheeled palette down the ramp onto the hanger deck below.

"That's the sidearms," Jason muttered, slowing the video down a bit. From out in the corridor, the sounds of sporadic defense raged on.

A cargo officer had accompanied the robot up to the top of the ramp, but stayed onboard the _Transient _when the robot descended down it. A few seconds ticked by, almost a minute in the video's real time, before another man walked up the ramp and met the cargo officer. The two engaged in a quick conversation before the cargo officer turned behind him and waved to someone off camera. The men then nodded to each other and returned along their respective entry ways.

A few moments in the video passed, again, about a minute in real time, before whoever was being waved to finally showed themselves. Hefting in groups of four, the large, uniformed men stumbled under the weight of their burdens.

Fox's eyes narrowed. "Wait, hold the picture."

Jason complied, freezing the video where it gave a good still shot of one of the coffin sized containers in the center of the screen. Its four bearers, one on each side, were leaning away from it, struggling against the mass.

"I think I recognize that box…" the mercenary captain trailed off, cocking his head a little and staring intently at the monitor.

The staccato report of Miyu's weapon outside the bridge triggered something in his mind.

"That's it. That's him," he said, sounding as sure as if he were arguing the existence of gravity. "He's in one of those containers."

"_Inside_ them?" Jason questioned, arching an eyebrow and looking back at him. "What makes you so sure?"

Fox sighed, as if trying to convince someone arguing _against _gravity of its existence. Shaking his head as he spoke, he said, "It's…it's a long story. Just trust me on this." He paused for a second, gathering the right words. "A while back, we ran across a large group of those boxes at what we later found to be one of Bauker's depots. Yohan. Inside them were people, sedated and prepped for shipping."

"They were just laying there in the box?"

"No there was…something else. It was way more elaborate than that. I don't know why. I didn't think about it too much." Jason began to ask another question, but Fox interrupted him with the answer before he could finish. "Because I had other things on my mind at the time. Point is, if they're shipping Peppy around, they'll probably do it in one of those boxes."

Jason considered what was said for a moment, then turned back to the navigator's station. "Alright. Gimme a minute and I'll download everything I can about the _Transient_'s stop at Hrakness Station."

"Then we can go, right?"

"My thoughts exactly, Falco."

* * *

Miyu didn't feel the tap on her shoulder pad the first time.

The lynx was too focused on the iron sights of her submachine gun and what lay beyond them. It wasn't an accurate weapon by any means, but in short bursts, it could paint a rough target the distance from where she was crouching to where the _Transient'_s crew and security forces were mounting a final push for the bridge.

The second time Fox patted her, she angrily glanced at him to see the vulpine standing over her, shotgun in hand with a look of determination.

"What?" she spat, clearly annoyed he was distracting her from her shot.

"Time to go," he replied. Stacked behind him were Jason and Falco, looking frightened and relieved to be back in the line of fire, respectively.

"Oh."

"It's about time," Crendon chimed in from the other side of the open corridor hatchway. "They'll be bringing the main generator back on any minute now." He leaned out and fired a few rounds from his weapon, punctuating the sentence.

"I thought," Miyu began before ducking back from the doorway, milliseconds ahead of a series of angry slugs meant for her. "I thought the EMP was supposed to-"

"Only temporarily," the Gamma replied, shaking his head. "We weren't supposed to be here this long. Once they get the power back, they'll be able to vent select portions of the hull into the vacuum by remotely sealing everything but the rooms we're in. Provided a Cornerian patrol doesn't happen upon us first."

"Let's not be here when they figure that out," Fox said, canting his head towards the security forces. "Gamma, is there any way to get your heavy soldiers to help us punch through from behind? Break this pin they've got us in?"

"Thinking the same thing, merc." The Gamma ducked for cover again, this time moving away from the doorway and allowing Aush to take his place. He slid back further along the wall, over to where Lemarc was lying slumped against the bulkhead, and put a finger to his earpiece.

"Delta Heavy, send two of your unit to the midpoint of the _Transient, _following this com's signal. We're pinned at the bridge." There was a pause, punctuated by a gunshot from Aush's rifle, and a scream of agony from further down the main corridor. "We're breaking policy; we'll be back at the _Osgard_ before they realize two of you have left the egress site. Double time it, Delta."

Without speaking it out loud, the group realized it would be a minute or two before they could expect any help from the suited soldiers. Their armor and firepower, while intimidating, left a little to be desired in the mobility department. And in a firefight, a few minutes could mean all the difference. If they could only hold out a little while longer…

Miyu peered out into the hatchway, quickly ducking back as a bullet tore through the air far too close for comfort. Swearing, she hefted her submachine gun into the threshold and unleashed a burst, blindfiring down the ship's central corridor.

"So did you find your grandpa?" she yelled to Fox over the sound of small arms fire, weathering a return volley from behind cover.

"I think so," he shouted in reply, looking restless in his inability to do anything. The hatchway was only large enough for two to fire from, and with Crendon taking the spot opposite Miyu, there was no direct way to contribute. Far more than getting shot in the thigh minutes earlier, being unable to help made him uncomfortable. "We've got a lead to Hrakness Station in Sector Y."

"Our rendezvous with Lord O'Donnell is in the same sector," Crendon reported, glancing at Lemarc for a moment before continuing. "It's in an area of space controlled by Warlord Siona. I'll talk with the Alpha, and he'll talk to Wolf; we could probably work out a search party to check it out."

Fox blinked, his jaw slightly agape in a mild shock. "Gamma, that's…really kind of you." His words came out almost as a question.

Falco canted his head. "Yeah. What gives?"

For the first time since meeting the man, the mercenaries of the Star Fox team saw Gamma Crendon's lips twist into something approaching a smile. It tugged at one side of the jackal's muzzle over the other, turning it lopsided and even, Miyu dared think, slightly…_endearing_.

"I've seen you fight now, McCloud," he said, his voice as commanding as ever, only adding to weight of his words. "A man like you fighting for a cause like your friend…nobility's a strange thing to find in these times. And I'm happy to help it where I can."

Fox heard Aush snort with derision, but kept his gaze leveled at the Gamma. The jackal's intense eyes betrayed no dishonesty as they looked back. Perhaps Fox had misjudged the man; perhaps he had misjudged Wolf's entire organization. Either way, a small smile spread across his features, and he nodded. "Thank you, Crendon."

"Don't mention it," he replied, taking a few more shots at the Blue Arrow security forces down the corridor before turning back to the vulpine. "I think I hear my boys now."

Fox's orange ears perked, and he unconsciously tilted his head. Over the staccato of weapons fire, he could -very faintly at first, but building in volume quickly – make out the sound of heavy boots clanging on the metal deck. Crendon began communicating again through his headset, issuing orders and motioning for the mercenaries to get ready to move out.

The security forces must have noticed the new sound as well, as their fire quickly faded until the clanging sound felt like the only noise on the ship. Panicked questions could be overheard from the other side of the corridor, escalating in pitch and urgency.

The questions turned into screams of panic as Wolf's heavy troopers finally entered the fray. Fox felt the now familiar _whump-whump _in his chest as the deep bass tones their weapons gave off rumbled through him.

"Let's go!" Crendon shouted, leading the way into the next partition, now free of suppressing fire.

Aush quickly dropped in behind him, followed by Miyu and Falco. Theirs was a relieved gait, a confident jog towards their saviors in metal armor. Jason brought up the rear, still maintaining a death grip on his pistol. As he began into the next partition though, he stopped and turned around, looking back at Fox, remembering the other vulpine's wound.

"You need some help there?" he asked, noticing that the mercenary was looking off in a different direction.

"They're just going to leave him?" Fox asked in return, presumably directing his words at Jason, though he could have very well been asking nobody in particular. His eyes pointed to the body of Lemarc, propped up against the bulkhead. His armor was still in one piece, but a slug had found its way just above the collar, implanting itself in the canine's throat. The deep red matting of his fur around the wound site suggested it had once bled profusely, but it had since dried to a trickle.

"Looks like it, Fox," Jason answered, shrugging. His breathing showed through in his voice, and it sounded as though saying the sentence had lifted some sort of weight from him. "They can't all be saints up in the black, you know."

'_I suppose not,'_ Fox thought in reply, shaking his head slowly. _'So much for nobility.' _This wasn't right. He had no connection whatsoever to Wolf's soldier, lying dead against the bulkhead, but he couldn't help but feel _wrong _leaving him there. It hit him suddenly, but he couldn't say he didn't expect it.

Peppy. It felt like he was looking at Peppy there.

Hadn't he and his team done the same to the hare as Crendon and his soldiers were doing to their own? Left him dying or dead in a prison somewhere, or worse? It was a thought he had been contending with every few days, though it was less frequent once a few days had passed after the incident at Yohan. It was a strange thought, coming and going seemingly at whim, immobilizing the vulpine with guilt when it hit, and leaving him with remorse as it left.

Of course the answer was always the same. No, this wasn't similar; Fox and his team were actually _doing_ something. Everything they were working at was working towards finding Peppy and rescuing him from whatever conspiracy had taken him from them. Every mission the mercenaries contracted increased their bank accounts, which were under fake IDs of course, given their status as wanted criminals. Every credit in their accounts meant they could afford another information broker, another lead to follow. None had been so potentially successful as what they had just found on the _Transient_, but they were far from sitting idly by, waiting for Peppy to fall into their laps.

But then why couldn't he ever shake the feeling when it came up? Why did he have to content himself with letting the guilt run its course?

Jason sighed, guessing the surface of Fox's thoughts. "There's nothing you can do, Fox; if they don't look out for their own, it's not on us to tell them to. …Now we've got to go."

Fox nodded, snapped back to the situation at hand. He took a final glance at Lemarc.

'_Don't worry Peppy; we won't leave you. Just like you never left us. I promise.'_

* * *

'_It's a little like an aquarium, to be honest.'_

Joseph Bauker stood tall and inhaled deeply as he gazed upon the curved bank of monitors before him. Arranged along the largest wall of his communications room, the viewscreens formed an intimidating barrier, one which, despite their current lack of subjects, would immobilize a lesser, more timid man with stage fright.

Luckily, Warlord Bauker was not such a man. The cougar was no stranger to public speaking or oration; in fact, it was what he insisted gave him an edge over his fellow military leaders. Any commander could pace his forces into a battle. Any captain could call a charge. But in order to be a great military leader, Bauker felt, you had to _lead_ your army. Make them want to follow you. Make them _need _to.

He knew he didn't have the longest history of strategic brilliance of the Warlords; that title belonged to Raymund. Nor did he have the largest fleet. That one went to Norwood. But he was more than pleased being the most charismatic of them all. After all, he reasoned, for all of Norwood's hardware and Raymund's military exploits, they would both be appearing on their own screens amongst the sea in front of the cougar, reporting to _him_.

Bauker smiled, his dimming yellow fur creasing in response to the skin beneath. His facial features were close to immaculate, something he was well aware of. His build, tall but strong, fit the model of an ideal vid star, right down to the calluses of his palms. He was rugged yet handsome; wise but youthful.

If there was one man and one many only to lead the revolution the Warlord had been nurturing, a rally point for all freedom loving beings of the Lylat System to gather behind, he figured he could do much worse than himself.

He straightened the hem of his uniform, brushing it flat across his stomach. The old Admiral's uniform had held up well in the ensuing years of Andross' demise; the faded Venomian olive drab having been spruced up a bit with dye, brought back to the full vigor it had shown upon arrival after his last promotion. His various campaign ribbons and medals from the Lylat War were garish and obnoxiously extravagant in most situations, especially considering they were from the losing side, but this was one of those times when one had to truly _lead_. And sometimes, followers needed to be reminded of why they were following.

'_Besides,' _he thought as the first viewscreens began flickering to life, their signals having been established. _'We didn't so much lose the war as we had a swift change in management.' _He suppressed a shudder as he thought of the last time he had seen Andross, the mad engineer who initiated the conflict in the first place. The ape was a twisted monstrosity, the victim of self experimentation in the extreme.

Bauker turned the shiver into an innocent shifting of weight. _'Good riddance.'_

The first viewscreen snapped into focus, showing the reptilian face of Warlord Raymund. The long, wide snout, covered in green scales typical of his species, was twisted into a self confident sneer. If Bauker hadn't been aware of the fact that this was a normal expression, he may have taken offense.

"Raymund, my friend," Bauker said, sweeping his arms out as though receiving the reptile in person. "It's good to see you again. I trust the Cornerians have blunted many a sword against you since we last spoke."

Raymund snorted, and his sneer somehow increased. "Their ships are strong, but they have no…creativity." The way he said the last word forced Bauker to suppress another shiver. "They are like children with tanks."

Next to connect was Admiral Gage of the Cornerian Seventh Fleet, followed immediately by a small number of his highest ranking command staff on their own screens. Bauker recognized the hare, Bishop, from an earlier meeting, but the others were new.

Before he could great the weary looking husky and his subordinates, the rest of the screens flipped on in quick succession. Warlord Norwood, the CEO of Blue Arrow, and a few others filled the viewscreen wall, each with a subordinate or two. Everyone who had joined his coalition was present, ready to hear the news he had called the meeting to report.

Even _he _was present, one monitor filled by a shadowed silhouette. The Warlord tried not to look at this viewscreen. Like the other screens, Bauker knew the transmission was two-way, and that if the man wanted to, he could have simply turned off his transmitter, allowing him to view the presentation without worrying about being seen, but it appeared as though the entity appreciated the image the lack of lighting literally presented. Only a few of those present would be able to see the shadowed figure's transmission, and Bauker considered himself lucky he appeared to be one.

There was one screen suspiciously blank, however; Warlord Ypson's.

Bauker was about to call a subordinate to question what was keeping the commander when that very subordinate came scurrying up to him.

"Warlord Ypson reports he is unable to attend the conference," the leopard said, reading from a hand screen. "The Cornerian Fifth fleet recently engaged him in battle and he is still occupied."

"Ah, that would make sense," Bauker nodded. "Thank you Major Wilkens. We shall begin then."

A soft hum of conversation had risen since the various monitors had filled, mostly from various officers and leaders discussing with members of their party off camera, though a few had been more enterprising and were discussing items of importance with other delegations present.

Bauker raised his hands, calming those remotely congregated and gathering their attention. He let them focus on him for a few moments, letting the silence build, before breaking it again with his sturdy, orator's voice.

"Gentlemen," he began, knowing a couple attendees were female but choosing to eschew their collective pronoun. The phrase 'Ladies and Gentlemen' had too much of a showman's feel to it. "I know many of you are busy, some urgently so, so I will keep this as brief as possible. Our struggle for Lylat's freedom is ever in motion, and I won't tie up talents like yours in a logistics meeting like this. Not for too long, anyway." That got a few chuckles, though more thin smiles and unimpressed frowns.

He casually strode to a small podium, equipped with a flat datascreen, tilted so only he could see, though he knew the information would be transmitted to all those present. Tapping the screen, he opened the first folder of the package, causing the data to spill out across identical datascreens in the Warlord's and various leaders' offices across Lylat. Even as he spoke, the information scrolled down the screens, automatically at first, but fully reviewable after the meeting had concluded.

"Project Afterlife, I'm pleased to announce, has produced viable results, and is proceeding into full scale operation. As most of you know, Project Afterlife was a theoretical project started under Andross before the war, aiming to tap a new resource for soldiers. In this sense, it has succeeded, and those of you with ground commands can expect to see the fruits of our labors shortly."

He paused, letting what he said sink in for a few moments, and allowed himself a smile. Project Afterlife had been quite a risk, but the reward, if successful, was great. And the project was. And justly, the reward was. Though little ground was gained against the Cornerians in a ship to ship battle, once on the ground, the Project's results would come into full effect.

Bauker tapped his personal screen again, opening the next folder in the presentation. Just as before, various pictures and graphs scrolled by, displaying all sorts of information on his next subject.

"Second, Project Lithium. Though nearing the end of its projected development cycle, our top technicians and researchers are projecting delays-"

"Warlord Bauker," one of the screens interrupted, the speaker a rotund canine whose voice Bauker immediately recognized as Warlord Norwood. "You have been absorbing our credits for Lithium since nearly the end of the Lylat War. And while Afterlife is most impressive, this project is significantly less so. What advantage will this give us against the Cornerian Armada?"

Grumbles of agreement followed closely in the wake of Norwood's objection. Bauker waited patiently for them to die down. He spread his arms again once they did.

"Have a little faith, my friends. The forerunners of Lithium have already produced incredible results, have they not?"

Norwood's image nodded, though his voice became no less accusing. "Absolutely; the sector jumpgates have made it nearly impossible for us to be ambushed in those regions of Lylat." He added, tapping the desk in front of him with force. "But that was not the question. Will Lithium truly be worth the investment?"

"Gentlemen, need I remind you of the Battle of Sector Y?" he asked, beseeching those assembled. "How our ships ambushed the Cornerian fleet due to their radiation shielding? From close to the sector core, we were able to decide the place and strength of our ambush."

Raymund snorted, crossing his arms. "If I remember correctly, Joseph, a flight of mercenaries penetrated the entire fleet during that battle and took down those secret weapons you developed yourself."

"Inconsequential," Bauker dismissed the statement. And it was. He had gotten over the disgrace of losing the battle suits surprisingly quickly. "The point is, the Cornerians could not guess where we would show up in that sector, since we could hide where they couldn't go. That is the essence of Project Lithium. The jumpgates are only the first step."

"And to that end, we already have the key to Lithium in our care." Bauker glanced down at his datascreen, just as an image of Peppy Hare scrolled down it. "It's only a matter of time before we find the proper methods to withdraw it for our uses."

Bauker knew he would get a mountain of questions for that one, but it appeared as though those gathered were content to raise their concerns after the meeting had concluded. He suppressed a smile. At least he could be honest about how short he planned the meeting to be.

"Things are beginning to come together," he continued. "Admiral Gage had recently reported the destruction of our friend Wolf O'Donnell's assets near Fortuna. Without his band of former mercenaries and Venom's dregs, our final loophole has been filled."

"A great day is coming for Lylat, my friends; I look forward to sharing it with all of you."

* * *

A/N:

**chaos Leader**: Thanks for the review cL; I'll be sure to keep an eye on scene placement. I've read a few different books which treat chapters in two different ways. In the first way, a chapter is a period of time, and if the plot involves different points of view, any changes in any POV that occurs during that chapter's time period takes place in that chapter. This can lead to a lot of jumping around. In the other way, a chapter is the opposite in that it focuses on one POV for some amount of time. In both ways it works, and I guess I'm still having trouble deciding which works best in this story. In any case, thanks again for the review!

**RedBay**:I literally laughed out loud when you mentioned the type with 'shirt.' Sophia's rescue was something that I spent a great deal of time thinking through, but I guess, like chaos Leader mentioned, it could've used some more work with scene placement. Hopefully this chapter was a bit better in that respect; everything happens in a linear sense. I understand how attempts at getting 'cute' with stories (i.e. trying to misdirect the reader, work in time period jumping, etc.) can fail, and I appreciate you pointing those things out. Thanks for the review RedBay :)

**TheFrustrated**: Thanks for the kind words TheFrustrated; while reviews like RedBay's and cL's are genuinely helpful and appreciated, your words put a smile on my face. I'm sorry this chapter has been so long in arriving; responsibilities have sadly dragged my attention elsewhere. But I will always keep working on this story until completion, I can promise you that. It's been nearly five years now. It'd be a shame to give up on that :)

Thanks to everyone who reads this story, and again, I apologize for the delays in updating. Life has a way of dragging us away from what we like doing, and for me, this is one of those things. But if you guys keep reading, I'll be sure to keep finding time to update. And reviews, both quick ones and critical ones, while entirely optional, are entirely appreciated too.

-Irish Redd


	30. Chapter 30: Warlord Siona

**XXX:**_Warlord Siona_

* * *

"My men on Hrakness have been searching the station since I received the message from _Osgard_'s Alpha; I assure you Fox, if Peppy Hare is there, he will be found."

Fox glanced at Wolf O'Donnell, trying to gauge the level of authenticity in his statement from the way he walked.

The lupine stared straight ahead as he and the fox progressed down the corridor of the base, shifting his gaze on occasion as they passed an intersection in the wide hallway, but otherwise keeping his attention on where he was going. His overcoat billowed slightly as he moved, though they were walking at just above a leisurely pace. The wolf's good eye caught Fox's stare, and he turned his head to face the mercenary. The one eyed stare was level and piercing, though not overtly hostile.

"I'm sorry," he continued, facing forward again. The pair's boots fell upon the deck with a purposeful clack. "But that is that best I can do."

Fox didn't say anything for awhile, but his shoulders drooped a bit. It had been almost a week since the _Transient _stopped at Hrakness; the possibility that Peppy's crate had been shipped again since then was very high. Fox was cogniscient of the fact the whole time, but still allowed himself to hope, just a little bit, that they would find his lost father figure at the station.

It had been a few days since the mission aboard the freighter. Since the _Osgard _had rendezvoused with Wolf's flagship, Fox and the rest of his crew had had the chance to return to the _Great Fox, _change, and recuperate. The vulpine himself was back in his normal greens; his worn trousers and shirt fresh from the ship's washing unit. His grey flight vest was fitted over the shirt, the familiar weight of both it and the pistol slung to his hip a slight comfort in the unfamiliar corridors of Warlord Siona's primary base.

Situated on the surface of the small planetoid Discord, deep within Sector Y's radioactive zone, the base was small and compact. Building space was limited, since the past eras of powerful wave activity had baked and corrupted the planetoid's surface, creating its present jagged and canyon filled geography. Simply finding enough flat ground to build on had been difficult. In addition, the generator based shielding which kept the radiation out was maintained at great expense, putting any room within its protective shell at a premium. The consequential advantages of the radiation were worth it though; few ships had the shielding to neutralize the intense emissions deep within the sector, creating a natural wall against any unwanted attention from outside.

The _Lone Wolf_ had had no such issues reaching the base's vicinity, however. The same shielding which protected it in the reactor cloud near Meteos had proved more than adequate to repel Sector Y's dangers. Safe within one of the _Lone Wolf_'s massive docking bays, the _Great Fox _likewise had nothing to fear from the radiation. Fox remembered the process of disembarking from the _Osgard_ through a shuttle on the fringes of Sector Y, rejoining Wolf's flagship.

Starting with the shuttle's crew, Fox had noticed a slight change in the way Wolf's men regarded the Star Fox team since their mission on the _Transient_. Perhaps it was their less guarded stance, or the way they looked him and his friends in the eyes rather than ignoring them in the hallways of the _Lone Wolf_, but there was suddenly a hint of respect in the air. Not much of one, to be fair, but enough that Fox no longer felt he had to keep his guard up around them so much, lest one of them strike him down for his bounty when he wasn't paying attention.

Slippy and Katt met them at the _Great Fox_, informing them of Linka's status and what they had been doing since the _Transient _mission had launched. Of the latter, there was little to tell; mostly wandering the portions of the _Lone Wolf_ that weren't off limits and repairing the damage done to the mercenaries' home during the flight from the Cornerian Seventh Fleet.

However, of the former, there was news. Unfortunately, it was the kind Fox hated to hear.

Linka had faded into a coma. Wolf's doctor had done everything he could, cleaning and properly caring for the young girl's wounds, but at the end of the day, she had still been shot in the head. Without a brain specialist, there was little anyone could do for her. Fox worried about her, but he was more concerned about Slippy. The mechanic had looked so worried when the toad had told him. It was to the point where he wasn't fidgeting _more _than usual; he just wasn't fidgeting at all. That sort of stillness in Slippy scared Fox.

Fox and Wolf turned a corner into an adjoining hallway, passing a pair of technicians discussing some system or another as the Warlord and mercenary captain proceed further into the base.

And then there was Bill to think about, too.

Just after he and Rhena had left to pursue the hound's fiancé, Fox realized that short of broadcasting to all of Lylat, he had no way of informing Bill of any new developments regarding their location or situation. Since at the time they had been in one of Meteos' numerous sensory dead zones, Fox had been unable to reach Bill on short range communications, either.

To fix the issue, before moving the _Great Fox _on its way, Fox had dropped a small message pod at the point where Bill and Rhena had launched. He assumed that Bill would realize the issue in meeting up with Star Fox again as well, and default to returning to the place where he left the team. In the pod, Fox encrypted a message for the former Cornerian pilot, consisting of a com frequency and another encryption code, both of which could be used together to contact the _Great Fox_ to safely arrange a meet up spot.

Since returning from the _Transient _mission, Fox had kept an eye on the _Great Fox_'s communications console any time he was on the bridge. So far though, no call had come through. He knew his friend was almost certainly in danger, but there was nothing he could do to help. Fox had his own issues to deal with; his own mark to track down. Bill knew what he was doing. All the vulpine could realistically do was wish him luck, and hope the message-waiting light on the _Great Fox_'s console would light up soon.

A pair of armed guards, dressed in the faded yellows of Siona's organization, blocked the door Fox and Wolf were approaching. Wolf nodded to one of them, who returned the slight head bob and stepped aside, prompting his partner to do the same. Wolf then led the way into the room beyond as the door swished aside.

On the other side was a small antechamber, occupied by a pair of similarly dressed women. The room was sparsely decorated, but the accents which were present had clearly been selected with care. It gave off the distinct vibe of a decorator who was doing the best with what they could afford, both monetarily and otherwise.

One of the women, seated at a desk out of the way of any traffic proceeding in and out of the room's two doors, was busy typing away at a datascreen in front of her. The young canine's golden locks were kept pinned up and out of her eyes, giving her a very business-like appearance. She wore a small headset, and her yellow garb was less focused on martial utility like those of the guards outside, and more so on the fashion of the time.

The other woman stood at attention at the doorframe of the threshold to the next room. She was more built than the slender secretary, and carried a weapon that matched her distinctly bodyguard like aura. She too wore a headset, but the female wolf had little else in common with canine she shared the room with. Her facial expression was one of incredible disinterest, though Fox could see that the grip on shotgun she held was tight. Her yellow fatigues had a bit more bulk to them as well, probably to make room for additional body armor. Fox allowed himself a mental smirk; her similarity to Rhena was uncanny.

The secretary looked up from her desk as Fox and Wolf entered, offering them a well practiced smile of welcoming.

She said, "Go right in, Mr. O'Donnell. Ms. Siona is expecting you and your guest."

Wolf nodded, leading the way past the bodyguard, who regarded them studiously as she stepped aside. Fox expected her to stop them to relinquish their weapons, but to his surprise, she said nothing as they proceeded into Warlord Siona's office, their weapons remaining with them. He did notice she slipped into the office behind them before the door closed, though, her grip on her weapon as tight as ever.

The office was surprisingly empty, though Fox wouldn't necessarily describe the room as bare. The few accents and pieces of decoration present were of extravagant and rare qualities. The desk and pair of chairs before it looked like they were carved from some sort of petrified, polished wood, a rarity on a non-terrestrial station. The chair behind it, occupied by the Warlord, was an old-fashioned leathered seat, with brass studs dotting the exposed surfaces of the dull red material.

Behind the desk at the far end of the rectangular room, the wall opened up into a ceiling to floor view of Discord's jagged surface. That sort of luxury was normally dangerous for an installation; something as small as a melon sized meteor could shatter the material. But Fox noticed the transparent material was recessed a half a meter or so, probably to make room for the blast doors which would spring up in the event of a meteor shower or similar emergency.

"Just a second," the warlord said, slowly reaching a black furred hand up to her glasses. She held a datascreen in the other, studying the text scrolling down it with interest. As soon as her hand reached the reading aids though, she flicked them off with one smooth motion, laying the screen to rest on her desk and looking up at the new arrivals to her office as she folded one hand over the other.

The cat's lips curled into a smile when she saw Wolf standing before her. Her features were those of someone who at one time could have been considered traditionally beautiful, but had since fallen prey to years of work and stress.

'_Trading one type of beauty for another.' _Fox suppressed a smile at the thought. His father had always instilled in him the idea that some sorts of appeal were fleeting, while others were something truly rare and to be valued. Work ethic was one of those, and based on her appearance, she was well equipped in that sense.

Lines at the Warlord's eyes gave her the air of being much older than she probably was; Fox pegged her at somewhere around middle aged. However, the vigor with which her eyes themselves moved, and sharpness of those same features made it clear that whatever prestige she earned as one of Lylat's post-Venom Warlords was well deserved. Though what sort of Warlord she was exactly Fox found himself eager to find out.

"Wolf," she said, her voice one of content welcoming, "It's good to see you again. Please, have a seat."

"Thank you, Lady Siona," he replied, sitting down in one of the elegantly appointed chairs.

"Oh please, O'Donnell," she replied, grinning but waving in dismissal, "I've told you before, that's almost as bad as the 'Warlord' title those Cornerians keep giving me." She looked at Fox, and motioned for him to sit as well. "Siona's fine."

"As you wish," the wolf replied, straightening his coat. "I have a problem I believe you can help with."

"And straight to business, as usual," Siona laughed, steepling her hands together and meeting his stare. She gestured at Fox, glancing at the vulpine again. "Without an introduction of your friend?"

Wolf visibly bristled at the woman's last word, and Fox couldn't help but feel a small chill run down his spine. Fox and Wolf were working together, sure, but friends were something the mercenary was sure they'd never be. And he was equally sure the lupine next to him felt the same way. In another universe, another time, perhaps, but too much history had already passed between them.

"Fox McCloud," Fox said when silence reigned for a beat or two. He offered his hand, which Siona politely took.

"_Lady _Siona," she said, casting a sly look in Wolf's direction. She released Fox's hand and sat back in her chair, shifting her gaze upwards a little, into the distance. "McCloud…McCloud…where do I know that name from? You're certainly too young, but your father…he wasn't an officer for Andross, was he?"

Fox nearly coughed. "No! Er, no," he sputtered before taking a moment to collect himself. "My father ran a mercenary unit out of Corneria named Star Fox. He died before the Lylat War broke out, and I took over the unit."

"Ah, well I know you then," she said with a comforting smile. "I was never in Venom's payroll, but you made quite a dent in my military counterparts during their service if I remember correctly. But I could have sworn I had heard your name before the war." Her eyes again became cloudy. "A mercenary. He wasn't Cornerian military then?"

Fox shook his head again. "Not that I know of." He was about to explain that Peppy Hare had been at one time, but he suddenly felt hesitant to give any sort of information to the woman in front of him.

"Hm," Siona finally said after another moment of thought. "Maybe my memory's already going. In any case, welcome to Discord, and please, don't be concerned regarding your bounty or those of your men on my stations. As long as you're traveling with this old soldier, nobody will lift a weapon in your direction."

She turned back to Wolf. "But, if you're here with the incredibly valuable boy that almost killed you twice, then I'm sure this problem of yours is important. And more so than simply losing most of your fleet so recently. My condolences, by the way."

Fox's eyes widened at the amount of information she had just demonstrated knowledge of, though Wolf's remained as sharp as ever. Clearly, the latter was used to the verbal flexings of an experienced information broker.

"Thank you," he replied, his gravelly voice contrasting with Siona's motherly tones. "My problem is _our _problem, I'm afraid. Warlord Bauker. He's begun making his move against Corneria sooner than I had anticipated. If we don't put a stop to this, Lylat will fall into war again. And I'm not sure things will be as stable afterwards as they may be now."

"I will agree that this is a mutual problem," Siona said, nodding. The feline's face was solemn. "The organized black market thrives under the same conditions as organized mercenaries; unrest and uncertainty, not utter chaos. My specialty will fare no better than yours if Bauker and the Cornerians wipe each other out."

"I have a plan to help stop that from happening," Wolf continued. "Or at least put the brakes on it. But without the majority of my fleet, I will be relying on your services much more heavily."

Siona opened her arms. "You know I'm not a military leader, Wolf."

Wolf nodded. "But you have the infrastructure that I need. Weapons, supplies, intelligence, contacts with mercenaries. I have plenty of funds with which to compensate, of course, but I think you can realize the urgency of the situation."

"I can," Siona replied. Her features sharpened. "And truthfully, I'd given some thought to the matter as soon as I received your call a day ago. You've proven a valuable customer in the past, and a good friend, and I would offer you assistance even if circumstances were not as dire as they stand today. Given that they are, you'll have my support." She sighed, as if regretful of her next words. "I will require a fee, if only to keep my operations running and prying eyes from questioning why I'm doing so much pro bono work for someone, you understand."

"I do."

Siona smiled, though it was an expression that told Fox she knew the troubling times which lay ahead. "Consider myself and my resources at your disposal then."

"Thank you, Siona." Wolf offered no smile or warm expression in return for the feline's, but his voice lacked its usual edge.

Fox nearly started when she suddenly focused on him.

"Now for your business, Mr. McCloud," she said, losing the familiar tone she used with Wolf but maintaining a neutral openness. "Given your history with Wolf, you're not just here to collaborate with what he had to say. And he's not the kind to show off conquest trophies."

Fox took a breath, taking a moment to gather his words.

"I'm looking for a man who was-"

"What's his name?" she interrupted, her features sharpening again as though looking at prey.

Fox blanked, not expecting the sudden words. He would later realize it was simply the way she operated; rather than have a client explain any background about a person in question, it was usually easier to simply find out the name and immediately begin comparing notes. "Peppy Hare."

"Peppy Hare," she repeated, cocking her head. She almost looked amused. "_Again_ with this Peppy Hare. He seems to be some sort of celebrity."

"He's a very good friend of mine," Fox replied, his own facial lines drawing tighter. He didn't like the way she had used his name so flippantly. "He was captured by the Cornerian Seventh Fleet a little while ago and we've been tracking him down since."

"I know," she said sagely. "I've been tracking your progress personally, though you've done a good job of making it difficult for me. But I can't tell you how many times my databases have been 'hacked' into with information on your friend being the target. Of course, they never make it past the false walls to find the truly pertinent information, but their frequency is still impressive."

"Who is looking for him?" Fox asked, temporarily abandoning his initial line of question.

"Well, I could never give away the identities of those who paid for his information; it's bad for business, you understand." Her expression then took on a more mischievous tone, betraying the youth behind her experienced eyes. "But I hold no such respect for those who chose to try to _steal_ the information from me. Most of the hacking attempts could be traced back to Warlord Bauker, or bases associated with his allies. Some were fairly recent, too; as in, since Peppy Hare was captured."

Fox blinked and was taken aback. That was interesting news. Why would Bauker be continuing to try to find information on Peppy when the hare was already in his custody? What _was _Peppy that he was suddenly so important to the major players of the approaching war?

"This surprises you?" Siona probed.

"It…does," Fox replied.

"Welcome to the information world, Mr. McCloud. Sometimes people we've known our whole lives can have entire histories we know nothing about. There's always something new to learn around every corner."

Fox reflected on her words for a moment before returning to the primary reason he was there. He sat up in his chair, trying to force his tone towards business, even while his mind was busy considering the questions he was asking himself.

"We have some video evidence, and we think we've traced him to a station of yours; Hrakness. He was aboard the Blue Arrow freighter _Transient_ and shipped, probably unconscious, in a suitably sized crate. But the trail is close to a week old, and I was told, and hoping, you would have some insight on the matter."

Siona nodded, steepling her hands again in a manner Fox recognized as thoughtful. "This explains why your men have been poking around," she told Wolf, glancing for a second at his good eye. The feline returned to Fox. "Blue Arrow has been a valuable customer of mine for many years, since before the Lylat War, back when I merely ran a freeport. It was only relatively recently that Bauker has taken hold of them. It makes me sad; Robert Ferador, the CEO, was a good friend of mine before the 'merger'. He hasn't been the same since he adopted Bauker's politics. Shame."

She took a breath, shaking the memories of her old friend from her mind. "But, as far as Hrakness goes, it _is _a freeport. Though I run it, I don't always have direct control over its shipping concerns as I do with most of my other stations. I don't condone sentient trafficking, but as much as I hate to admit it, it is possible something like a few crates could have slipped by without the station master's knowledge. I'll have a word with him about it. If I can't get you Peppy Hare, I can at least probably get you the crate's destination when it was shipped off again. You'll provide your video for my men to use?"

Fox nodded, "Of course."

"Good. I'll have something for you in a few days. I'll wave my usual fee for this little effort, but understand that it won't be that way in the future. You are Wolf's friend." Fox blinked at the words. "Not mine. Not yet."

* * *

Back in the shuttle, bound for the _Lone Wolf_ docked at a supply station well away from the surface base, Fox glanced out the front viewport. Beyond the uniformed pilot of the craft and his instruments, out in the surprisingly transparent, yellowish fog of Sector Y – '_more of a very faint mist, really' –_the tail of one of Siona's shieldships glowed brightly. Small and lozenge-shaped, with a large projection dish vertically bisecting the shuttle-size craft, the ship projected a protective bubble large enough for a flight of small to medium sized craft to be protected from the radiation of the sector. It acted as a taxi of sorts, escorting vessels without the proper shielding in and out of the radioactive zones, opening the stations contained within to a broader range of customers, including those who couldn't afford such an advanced protection system for their own ships.

They had been traveling for some time, and the outline of Wolf's flagship was only now appearing off in the distance ahead of them. It floated in space a small distance away from a station, docked to a mooring armature that was nearly invisible against the relatively huge structures of both the supply station and the _Lone Wolf_. The black and red uniformed pilot made some slight course adjustments, angling towards one of the _Lone Wolf_'s hangers.

Even before reaching the overlapping protection of both the _Lone Wolf _and the installation it was docked at, the shieldship lost relative altitude and glided towards the station. They had reached the edges of the radioactive portion of Sector Y a little while ago, where standard shielding was enough to deflect the meager rays that reached that far. The shielding onboard the station was there mainly as a precaution. And Fox knew Wolf never let the _Lone Wolf_'s guard down.

A chime broke the silence of the shuttle's cockpit, preceding the voice of the station's dock master.

"O'Donnell shuttle, this is Venture Station control; please state your departure port and destination," the tinny voice said. Being escorted by the shield ship, it was clear the shuttle already had clearance to be in Warlord Siona's space, but the information was apparently still needed to satisfy some information requirement or another.

"Shuttle _Persistence, _hailing from Discord Station," the pilot replied, keying his com microphone. "Destination is the _Lone Wolf_."

"Accepted _Persistence_," the dock master came back. "Please proceed along reported course. Venture Station, out."

The _Lone Wolf _grew larger as the _Persistence _neared it, looming over the shuttle in a way which simultaneously inspired both fear and comfort. As it ate up more and more of the view out of the shuttle's viewport, Wolf's voice broke Fox out of his trance, causing the vulpine to turn towards the Warlord.

"My Alphas and I are planning raids against Bauker's supply lines and more outlying bases," he began, keeping his gaze focused on the viewport. "Until we have time to analyze his forces and how they react, we won't be able to safely do much more than these small unit strikes. Since your pilots seem to work together well, I want you to lead some of these missions." His eye finally found Fox's, as if daring the fox to disagree with him.

Fox dared. "Why would we?"

Wolf smiled one of his predatory smiles, laughing a little. "Because you want to, Fox. You must already realize how intertwined our goals are, especially since Siona lit slip Bauker's interest in Peppy. And even if Peppy had nothing to do with Bauker, even if he were back on your carrier right now, you would still want to, knowing what you know about Lylat's precarious situation."

"Working with my forces grants you the ability to do so much more than working alone against Bauker. Lombardi and your toad will want to out of a dedication to Peppy, and your Cornerian pilots will want to out of desire to exact revenge against Bauker's allies in the Seventh Fleet."

The way Wolf assumed things about his friends raised Fox's eyebrow, but the way those assumptions were correct caused a sense of unbidden frustration to rise in him. He quickly chopped it down, acknowledging to himself that the lupine was probably right.

Wolf went on. "You would be included in our planning sessions as part of my council, though we would pick the final targets. You would retain total authority over your pilots in combat, and be granted an equal portion of any salvage we recover, proportional to your pilots' composition in the total forces committed to the strike. And of course, you would be paid as a mercenary unit."

Fox took Wolf's words into a deep consideration, remaining silent as the shuttle turned for its final approach into one of _Lone Wolf_'s twin hangers. Through the front viewport he could see the _Great Fox_, its unique silhouette barely contained within the hanger's walls. He could see some tiny figures moving around at the bottom of the mercenary ship's docking ramp, recognizable as some of his team if only by their contrast with some of Wolf's uniformed soldiers talking with them. The shuttle effortlessly passed through the cloudy, magnetic containment field holding atmosphere in the hanger, and the figures abruptly snapped into focus.

Fox's mind told him what his heart was having trouble believing; Wolf was absolutely right. Regardless of their history, and regardless of their differences in belief or operational protocol, they were each other's best hope at putting a serious dent in Bauker's plans. Perhaps by working together, they could stall the Warlord long enough for some of Lylat's military leaders to come to their senses, and wake up to the reality they were facing if they committed to another full scale war so soon. And if even Peppy weren't an issue, Fox found himself agreeing that he would want to participate without hesitation.

The fact that Peppy _was _an issue seemed to only add weight to Wolf's argument. Thanks to what he learned from Siona, it was clear that Bauker and Peppy would be a package deal; rescuing Peppy would throw a wrench into Bauker's plans, whatever they were, and make Fox and his team a target of his. In short, recovering his friend would make the Warlord mad, so why not preempt the event and start chipping away at him now, and work towards Lylat's safety at the same time?

Fox's mind was good at presenting such logical arguments to his heart, but the latter still couldn't shake the feeling of distrust he felt radiating from Wolf. He would agree to work with the wolf, but the mercenary would be doing so while carefully watching his back every time he dealt with the lupine.

"I'll run it by my team," Fox said finally as the shuttle touched down. The pilot began running through his post-flight checks as the ramp at the rear of the craft descended to the deck below.

Fox unbuckled his restraint and stood up, making his way to the exit ramp without waiting for Wolf's dismissal. A small part of him had hoped the sudden, slightly rude gesture the motion presented would be something Wolf wasn't expecting, but all he noticed was the lupine nodding solemnly and sporting a thin smile. Stoic, as always.

'_The man's unflappable,' _Fox couldn't help but think as his boots touched the plating of the _Lone Wolf_'s docking bay.

It was a short walk over to where the _Great Fox _sat, taking up the majority of the docking bay's space. Fox had to assume the _Lone Wolf_'s compliment of fighters and other support craft were occupying the opposite hanger to the one he now walked in.

As he neared the ramp to his ship, he could finally make out the identities of the figures standing around it. Falco and Jason were standing with their backs to the _Great Fox_, each carrying a large, heavy canvas bag over their shoulders, the sort with which a soldier would carry his personal belongings from base to base. At least, Fox had to assume they were heavy. While Falco sported his burden with ease, Jason's thinner frame was canted slightly to one side, struggling a little with the weight.

Falco called out to him when the avian spotted him approaching. "Fox, check it out!"

The pair of Wolf's soldiers chatting with the mercenaries turned to see who Falco was shouting at. As they did, Fox easily recognized the surprisingly light-hearted faces of Gamma Crendon and Aush, the soldiers who had helped them raid the _Transient_. They were dressed in more casual, though still military fatigues, colored in the typical black and red of Wolf's forces. The soldiers nodded at Fox as he got close enough for conversation.

"McCloud," Crendon offered, gripping Fox's hand with his own as the vulpine came to stop beside Falco. He was sporting the closest thing Fox could imagine a career soldier could come to a welcoming smile. "We thought we'd swing by and have a chat with some of your team."

"And they came bearing gifts," Falco grinned, hefting his bag a little. Jason offered a grin as well, though his was tempered some as he struggled to maintain his balance.

"A token of our respect," Crendon clarified, again with something resembling a smile. "These four units of armor mysteriously appeared in the 'surplus' column of our daily supply check, so we figured we'd donate them to a worthy cause. I don't suppose you know of a cause worthy of such equipment, do you?"

Despite the weight on his mind, Fox couldn't help but join in Falco's grin. This was one of the first friendly gestures his team had received since their bounties had been posted over a month ago. It was very possible that the offer was purposefully given to help swing Fox over to Wolf's side, though from Crendon's face, it looked like he was being genuine.

"I'm sure we could find something," the vulpine replied. "You're a generous person, Gamma."

"Please, Alecks is fine," the jackal said. "And don't mention it. We've got to get back to the _Osgard's _shuttlein the other bay, but if you ever need a favor, talk to the ground pounders over there. We appreciate those who appreciate a good gunfight."

"Will do Alecks. Take care."

The Gamma nodded and turned, the ever silent Aush in tow.

Fox turned with Falco and proceeded up the ramp into the _Great Fox_, exchanging one hanger for another. Jason fell into step behind them, his gait a little encumbered by the sack he had slung over his shoulder.

"You know, despite trying to kill us twice, I've gotta hand it to the guy; Wolf's got a pretty solid deal running here," Falco quipped. "If I were into the whole paramilitary deal, I could totally see myself signing on with them."

They reached the top of the ramp and begin threading their way through the collection of snubfighters present. Left in disarray by various quick landings, the four of Star Fox's Arwings and the trio of CDF fighters lay mixed about, along with Katt's fighter-turned-freighter. Seven of the eight ships were battle worn and heavily scored, with the exception of Slippy's Arwing off in the corner. Since Miyu had been using Peppy's fighter, and Fox and Falco their own, Slippy's was the only one which had escaped the recent skirmishes, its coat of paint almost entirely intact.

"It's funny you say that, Falco" Fox said cryptically as they reached the door into the rest of the _Great Fox_. "It's funny you say that."

* * *

"Alright now, if you could…yeah, that one right there. Just give it twist to the right…no, no, your _other _right, hon."

Miyu winced, flipping her grip on the wrench and levering it the opposite direction she had been pushing it. The shrill hissing that had permeated the engine compartment of the _Great Fox_ began slowly, gradually abating, falling in pitch and severity as the lynx twisted the control root.

"Good," Katt commented, her voice muffled somewhat from being virtually buried underneath one of the large, cylindrical engine coils. Her oil-stained overalls jutted out from underneath the complex, horizontal mechanism, almost giving the impression that it had fallen on her. However, it was attached at both ends to a series of gears and mechanical devices that extended into the bulkheads on either side of the room, so the effect was more that she had been hurled across the floor and skidded to a stop in the tightest confines the _Great Fox_ could offer.

Miyu stood above the feline's legs, continuing to tighten the small nub on the side of the cylinder facing her. There were a staggering number of cords and features on the cylinder, lending to it not the quality of a perfect geometrical shape, but more that of a dumbbell that had been dragged through a sticky pile of old springs, plugs and control rods. How Katt had managed to determine the right one for the lynx to operate was beyond her.

Finally, the hissing ceased all together, and for a moment Miyu thought she heard the engine itself utter a sigh of satisfaction before realizing it was the feline beneath it.

"Fantastic," Katt said with the half-hearted enthusiasm of a craftsman who had accomplished a feat many times before. "Now do me a favor hon, and pull me out?"

Miyu disengaged the wrench and looked around briefly for a place to set it down. The grimy engine room was littered with tool boxes and damaged parts which had been extruded from the engine over the past day or so of repairs to the _Great Fox_. There were only a few surfaces in the relatively small space without smears of oil and various mechanical fluids, and most of those were on the ceiling. All the shelves were occupied with spare containers and implements, so the lynx eventually settled on resting the spanner on the ground.

She bent down and grabbed Katt's ankles, giving them a firm pull. A few moments later, once Miyu was halfway to the door, the feline's face emerged almost unrecognizable for all the engine discharge smudging the usual pink and white. Her bandana had slipped off, but she managed to grab it with an outstretched hand, which emerged from beneath the engine a second later.

"Alrighty, she should be all set," Katt reported with a smile, pushing herself to her feet. She brushed a stray strand of blond hair out of her eyes, several of them having slipped out of her bandana during her work. "Let's fire 'er up."

Miyu stepped back obligingly, wiping a spot of sweat from her forehead, forgetting the grime on her hand and leaving a large smear of the stuff across the top of the fur on her face.

Katt did something off to the side of the cylinder, where the engine met the wall. A loud _clank _shot through the room, followed by a stuttering, bass level hum as the cylinder began to rotate. The entire assembly's motion gradually turned faster and faster, shortening the intervals between each hum until the engine became a blur. Finally, another _clank _sounded as a mechanical device kicked in, and the hum snapped into a solid, purring _thrum_. Miyu immediately recognized as the same sound she had become used to throughout the _Great Fox_, amplified as was appropriate now that she was standing a few meters away from the source.

Katt's smile turned into a grin as the girls looked at each other. Miyu saw her mouth the word 'beautiful', though any sound was drowned out by the engine's powerful noise. The feline jerked her head toward the door a few strides away, and Miyu followed her out into the _Great Fox_'s hallway. She keyed the door as she left, closing off the engine room and reducing the noise spilling from it to surprising degree.

Three doors were located there at the end of the hallway, one capping the corridor with the other two, including the one they had just emerged from, directly adjacent and across from each other. A pair of light panels was above each threshold, indicating the status of each of the _Great Fox_'s three engines. The center engine's door light was burning a solid green, with an equally solid _thrum _eminating from behind its door indicating that the primary source of power for the ship was running smoothly. One of the side doors had a red light instead, indicating it was currently offline, though Miyu knew it was in working condition if needed.

Miyu twisted her head towards the door they had just emerged from, and noted its previously red light had just changed to green. Since the _Great Fox _was just sitting in the _Lone Wolf_'s hanger, the extra power provided by the secondary engine wasn't required, but Katt had told her before they would run it for awhile to make sure it was repaired correctly. Seeing the feline had already begun to walk away, Miyu jogged briefly to catch up.

"So how long were you working on that before I came down?" Miyu asked after they had walked down the hallway a bit, speaking at a normal conversational level.

"Eh, a few hours," Katt shrugged, pulling a clean rag from inside her mechanic's jumpsuit and handing it to the lynx. "We'll still need to stop by that station down there to pick up some parts to get any thrust out of it – that shell it took in Meteos did a number on the emitter – but at least we've got the power part of it wrapped up. You got something on you by the by."

Miyu eyed her questioningly for a second before Katt pointed to her own forehead to illustrate.

"Oh," the lynx said, swiping above her eyes and peering closely at her forearms, aware that the dark spots which were a natural part of her species' fur could hide spots of oil. Her green trousers were apparently clean, though it would be hopeless to tell if her black shirt were dirty or not, due to its color. "Thanks," she smiled, handing the cloth back.

"No sweat," Katt replied, accepting the rag and beginning to dab some of her own oil stains away. The pair continued down the corridor towards the recessed stairway which extended both up and down towards the bridge level and hanger level of the _Great Fox_, respectively. Just as they reached the steps, she stopped and turned to the lynx.

"So," she began, stretching the vowel and lifting her voice. "You mind if I ask you something personal?" Her smile turned sweet and innocent.

Miyu looked at her, raising an eyebrow and crossing her arms. Few easy questions ever followed a phrase like that. "Sure."

Katt's eyes flicked off to the side for a moment before refocusing on Miyu. "Why did you join up with Foxie's crew?"

Miyu rocked back on her heels, exhaling and taking the question in. She knew, or at least she was pretty sure, that nobody had yet informed Katt of how Miyu came to be on the _Great Fox_, working for Fox and his team. In fact, outside the Star Fox team, she was pretty sure none of the other assorted pilots and soldiers they had encountered knew the story. And the jury was still out on whether or not she wanted to keep it that way.

She could see Katt's expectant face, and decided to stall for time.

"Well, a couple reasons," she began. "First, because they owe me twenty thousand credits."

Katt whistled with another smile. "Well, I won't ask why, but that's certainly as good a reason as any. "

"Mmhm. And the other reason…" Miyu trailed off.

The first reason she had given the feline was actually half true. The Star Fox team _did _owe her the share of the Cornerian escort contract that they never got paid. _'Although getting off without a bounty on my head could probably be interpreted as some sort of compensation.'_

But in all honesty, if Fox never paid her the money, she wouldn't have been all that disappointed. And that idea was genuinely surprising for the young lynx.

It intrigued her, and her eyes began to glaze over with thought. Why? Why wouldn't she be disappointed if the Star Fox team never paid her the substantial sum she was technically owed? Why didn't she care about that much of the resource she had been so desperate for barely a week ago out on her own? During any other time in her life that she could remember, it would have been absurd to pass up a dept like that. What was so different now?

Moments, images began flashing past her mind's eye in some unknown piece of her self's response to the questions she was thinking. Unbidden answers for doubts she never voiced.

A picture she saw hanging in the _Great Fox_'s lounge, of the whole Star Fox team gathered in that same room, pushed together so that everyone could fit in the frame of the photograph.

The myriad of five second conversations Fox and Falco shared with each other; the short quips and playful jabs of brothers who truly looked after each other.

The picture of Peppy and Fox's father she had picked up in the former's room.

Those vulnerable moments in Fox's bedroom, just after she arrived on the _Great Fox _with the team a week ago. They played before her like a silent movie, her lips moving in slow motion near Fox's ear, her whispered words echoing like a stone tossed in a canyon stream, her soul baring itself for the first time since…since forever.

'_I don't _have _anyone else…'_

For a split-second she wished she could be back in that room, back with her tear that refused to fall, that her lips had actually brushed his cheek, not out of something as cheap as passion or lust, but simply out of thanks. Thanks that she was alive, thanks that she had been allowed to come back to the last place she could ever remember a feeling of belonging. To remind her that, although she could only_ hope_ to one day be accepted in it, at least others somewhere out in the vast blackness of space had created for each other a loving, caring…

"…home…"

Katt raised an eyebrow. "What?"

Miyu shook her head, silently cursing to herself. How long had Katt been waiting for an answer?

"Er, and second…they owe me twenty thousand credits. And I plan to stick around until I collect. Simple as that."

Katt stared at Miyu, and the lynx was surprised to find herself staring right back. Seconds ticked by like hours, and it felt for a moment like the ever present _thrum _of the engine they had just fixed faded away, leaving them in complete silence.

'_It's been too long; she knows. She knows. I waited too long…'_

Finally, when the lynx felt like she was just about to shatter under the feline's withering gaze, Katt shrugged. "Fair enough. I'm sure the fact that they're pretty hot with a snubfighter can't hurt either, eh? 'Fly with the best' and all that jazz?"

Miyu's head flooded with cool relief, and suddenly she found herself fighting another mental battle, this time to keep the emotion from showing on her face.

"Yeah," she smiled, nodding. "Hey, can't hurt." The lynx glanced up, focusing at some point above them in the stairwell. "But speaking of which, I gotta talk to Fox about something."

"Alright," Katt said, with a smile, verbally dismissing her. "Don't let me keep you."

She watched Miyu ascend a few stairs before turning and descending in the opposite direction, skipping the occasional step and humming a little tune. For a second she thought she heard Miyu pause somewhere above her, but the footfalls almost immediately picked up again. She rounded a corner and headed down another flight. The pink cat wore a silly grin on her face, like she knew a secret that everybody wanted to know but nobody could.

'_Alright Miyu,' _she thought, reaching the bottom floor soon after and making her way to the hanger. She saw Falco as she entered the _Great Fox_'s main docking bay, the avian having apparently grabbed a wrong tool for his Arwing and making his way back towards the maintenance closet the team kept just inside the corridor. She quickly twisted her smile into the underhanded sneer she knew drove Falco mad with annoyance, making sure he saw as they passed.

'_You don't have to tell me everything. But it's good to know_ _you're here for a reason. And as long as you're not here for money, like I know you aren't, you're good in my book.'_

* * *

Miyu paused one step from the top of the stairwell and shook her head as Katt's humming faded away. What had just happened? How had she allowed herself to slip into such a reverie that she had literally forgotten someone was standing right in front of her? The images that had floated through her head just moments ago began fading back in, clouding her conscious with emotions…

'_No, no, no!' _her mind shouted, drowning out the memories.

She gripped the handrails of the staircase and took a deep breath, inhaling slowly and exhaling fully.

'_I know why I'm here,' _she thought, taking the final step in the stairwell and emerging into the _Great Fox_'s top floor. _'Because these guys are good pilots, and don't seem like the type who'll turn on you as soon as someone waves a paycheck in front of them.' _She proceeded to the bridge, allowing herself a small smile to convince herself of the truth of her thoughts. _'That sort of thing isn't as common as it should be.'_

The bridge doors parted for her, and she entered a conversation over incredible distances. She took a position just inside the doors, leaning against the bulkhead.

"…found your code pod in Meteos, McCloud," Rhena Haggerty's face was saying, thrown up on the _Great Fox_'s main viewport. As Miyu stepped onto the bridge, she could see the cockpit of the wolf's CDF fighter surrounding her, the com headset pressing into her ear.

"And based on where your transmission is coming from," Rhena continued, turning briefly to the side to check an instrument. "You're in…Sector Y?" Her intonation curled up, indicating the statement was intended as a question.

"That's right," Miyu heard Fox reply, sitting the command chair on the bridge's raised rear portion. The vulpine offered a smirk. "We've got quite a bit to explain, but that should probably wait until we get here. Make your course for Venture Station, just outside the radioactive zone of the sector."

"Got it," Rhena replied, entering something on her nav computer, just below the camera for the fighter's com system. "We're on your side of the asteroid field anyway, so expect us sometime tomorrow morning, Cornerian Standard."

"Will do."

"Hey, it's the black widow," Falco quipped, stepping through the bridge doors behind the lynx. Miyu noticed a series of grease stains on the avian's clothes as he passed, even in the dimmed lighting of the bridge. The avian settled down at a console chair, taking up a lounging position. "Where's Billy? How'd your little rescue adventure go?"

"We found Sophia. And Grey is ah…" Rhena began to report in her official voice after an initial scowl for Falco's nickname for her, but trailed off. For the first time since meeting the fiery haired wolf, Miyu saw her at a loss of words, though not out of anger, or any of her usually untempered emotions. If anything, her furtive glance off to the side of the cockpit to where the hound probably flew on her wing, where the camera couldn't see, betrayed a sense of…

'_Embarassment?' _Miyu thought with a creeping smile. _'Is that Rhena _embarrassed?'

Rhena coughed. "He's currently sharing a cockpit with his fiancé."

"Oh," Falco replied, nodding. Suddenly, with a start, his eyes lit up and he quickly shook his head as if a small insect had just buzzed him. "_Oh."_

Miyu heard a chuckle from the command seat, and Fox met her gaze as she looked at him, both of them with amused smiles. Nothing more needed to be said.

Rhena shook her head as if tiredly scolding an unruly child and breathed out, clearly wanting to drop the conversation. "Based on what the navigation system is giving me, our ETA is about oh-seven-hundred tomorrow. Out."

Her image closed on itself and the bridge viewport returned to that of the _Lone Wolf_'s hanger, with the field of stars and Venture Station beyond its opening into space. The bridge fell silent for a moment before Falco spun in his seat, facing the other two occupants. He leaned back and put his feet up on a nearby railing.

"Well, at least _somebody_'s getting some up here," he quipped. "What'd Wolf have to say?"

Fox exhaled. "He said he's got a plan which involves some contracts for us. Small unit raids on convoys, mostly, maybe some recon patrols." He took on the analytical air of someone waist deep in their element.

"_Proper _contracts?" Falco asked. "'Cuz it seems like it's been a long time since we've done anything other than chase down leads on Peppy. Nothing against Gramps, but we need some cash to feed ourselves at some point, too."

"Proper contracts," Fox answered, nodding in agreement with Falco's commentary. "There's a bit more to them though, so I was going to wait until tomorrow when Bill and Rhena get back to really go over everything. I don't want to have to explain everything twice."

Falco pursed his lips and nodded, weighing the idea and apparently judging its wisdom favorably. He casually glanced at the console behind him, taking in the sight of Venture Station out the viewport. "Well, while we're waiting for the C.N.S. _Love Boat_ to arrive, you think we should see what sort of scratch we can scrounge down on Venture?"

Fox smirked. "I was just thinking that."

* * *

Venture Station was a decidedly utilitarian installation, at least as far as consumer goods and similar services went. Established by trade guilds and commerce federations during the first, tentative years of intra system commerce in the Lylat system, it quickly became specialized in two fields. One was the development and manufacture of scientific instruments for the research progressing on the radiation of nearby Sector Y. The other was applied shielding manufacturing, which relied heavily on the results of the studies conducted on the odd radiation.

Such specialties, in addition to the placement of the station just outside Sector Y's radioactive cloud, didn't exactly make the station a hot spot for commerce. The initial luxury markets established on the station withered and closed up due to lack of patronage. Those discount shops which sprung up in their place to serve the relatively small population were likewise rather spare in their product, both in selection and in style.

'_Unfortunately, that applies to the pubs, too.'_

Fox took a pull from his drink, feeling the dull liquid swirl down his throat. The ale was serviceable, he determined after a moment of judgment, though certainly not anything he'd be eager for again. Based on the reactions of those sitting on either side of him at the bar, they felt much the same way.

"Ugh," Falco grimaced, wiping an amount of foam from his lips with his sleeve as he set down his mug. "Well, at least it's cheap."

Jason hummed an agreement from the other side of Fox, placing his mug back on the bar and twisting in his barstool a little. "It's no Fortunian brew, that's for sure. Er, no offense."

The bartender huffed a dismissal as he walked by, rubbing a freshly washed glass with a rag. "Hey, you find a freighter that'll run that stuff up here, and I'd be happy to serve it." The heavy set man's voice was deep and tired, evidence of a good deal of effort spent running his establishment. He reached up, placing the glass on a rack and withdrawing another for his rag to polish. "Until then, quit yer yapping and drink up."

Fox smiled, lifting his mug again. "Yes sir."

The bartender leaned in closer as Fox took another swig. "But I'll tell yer what. I'll get yer a whole _case _of Fortunian ale if you can tell yer lady friends to stop hustling my regulars. It's bad for business, you know."

Fox twisted to look in the direction the man was pointing, down towards the end of the bar. A ratty old pool table had been set up there in the small open space between where the bar ended and the wall began. Fox had seen it walking into the pub, before anyone was playing on it; he had seen how the felt material was torn up and the sides were scratched from years of use. The ceiling fixture hanging down almost to head level, lighting the green top, only helped to age it more. But unlike when they first came in, now there were four people standing around it.

Miyu paced around the table like a predator after prey. She held her cue with the same weight one would carry a rifle, stepping past one of her opponents without regard, causing him to shuffle step to get out of her way. Her eyes were focused entirely on the layout of the table before her, calculating shots and bounces like a pro, though how much of it was bluffing and how much of it was legitimate Fox couldn't tell.

Finding an angle she liked, she slowly bent to take the shot, lining her cue behind the proper ball. With a quick _snap_, the colored ball shot off the table's side bumper, and into one of the pockets.

Katt beamed at the two other players, young men, and adopted a wide stance with her own cue in the center. She exchanged a few words with the men, pointing to the nearly empty table itself and brandishing an endearing smile, her tail flicking with delight.

Both girls still wore the same clothes that they had been wearing before, Miyu with her outfit borrowed from Fox, and Katt her mechanic's jumpsuit. But they had had time to use the refresher before leaving the _Great Fox, _and subsequently the _Lone Wolf_, for Venture Station. The grease smears and stains on their exposed fur were gone, and Katt's hair was only slightly dazzling, with the sort of laid back look that generally took an hour to achieve.

The men exchanged a crestfallen glance and reached for their wallets, taking some currency out and dropping it on the felt. Somewhere in the background din of the bar, Fox thought he could make out their buddies already beginning to razz them.

Katt said something else Fox couldn't hear and offered the boys a wink before turning to rejoin the team. Miyu followed, a grin of victory over her face and a stack of small denomination credits in hand.

As the girls approached, Fox had to smirk. Katt reached a hand to the front of her jumpsuit and tugged the zipper, which had 'mysteriously' found its way below her ribs, upward.

"Hey there fellas," she said sweetly as she and Miyu reached them. She was almost skipping. "You'll never _believe _what we just won."

The bartender rolled his eyes and walked away, muttering. "Credits. That they would've spent here on booze."

"Here's the forty you loaned us, Jason," Miyu said, splitting the winnings in two and handing the fox half. Her grin could only be described as vicious. "Plus some interest. We managed to get them to do three to one odds."

"You're too kind," Jason replied, accepting the credit chips with a smile. "Incidently, remind me to never play billiards with you guys."

"Done."

"Well, we're off to do some shopping. Catch up with you boys later?" Katt said, stepping up to Fox and leaning on his shoulder like a teenager asking her father for a credit card.

Fox and Jason exchanged amused glances. "Go ahead," the mercenary captain finally said with a laugh. "Not like we could stop you from spending your earnings anyway."

"Better than how you _usually_ earn credits," Falco muttered under his breath just before lifting his mug to his lips again.

Katt giggled. "What's that now, babe?"

Falco turned his head towards her, meeting her gaze evenly and head on. Normally one would take the opportunity to make something up to cover their muttered insult. Falco raised his mug and smiled. "I implied you were a tramp for money."

Katt's own smile barely lost steam. "Alrighty. Just checking." She turned back to Fox. "Meet you back at the shuttle."

Fox nodded. "The _Obedience _leaves at twenty-three hundred for the _Lone Wolf_, so be there by then."

Katt checked her wrist chronometer. "Twenty-three hundred. Got it. You're a doll." She tilted her voice up on the last sentence and blew a little kiss to Fox before grabbing Miyu's hand and heading out of the pub. The lynx's initial protests were ignored as Katt reached the concourse, debated on a store, and headed off towards it and out of sight.

A few moments of silence passed between the three men as they returned to their drinks. Jason thumbed through his nearly acquired stack of currency, counting out how much he had gained with his, in hindsight, very smart investment. The background noise of the pub again overtook them, and Fox took a moment to take it in. The low grumblings of laborers off a late shift dominated the conversations, accompanied occasionally by their slightly higher pitched, though just as weary, female counterparts.

Fox noticed of Venture's two specialties, the occupants of this pub clearly leaned away from the scientific part. Most hands were covered with the grime and scars acquired over years of work in a factory or assembly plant. Most of the drinks on the tables were strong and bitter. The patrons bore the same worn, lived in look the rest of the establishment sported, with the odd scientist from one of the labs sticking out like a sore thumb.

'_Speaking of sore thumbs_…' Fox could see why the would-be smooth operators, now relieved of so many credits, had introduced themselves to Katt and Miyu so fast. The girls bore an equal resemblance to sore thumbs in the bar, particularly Katt with her bouncy demeanor and pink fur. With a flash of intuition, the vulpine realized why she had probably chosen that particular dye. If it was a dye. He made a mental note to do some more research on it.

Falco set his empty mug down and motioned the bartender for another, fishing the money out of his pocket. The sound caught Fox's attention, and as the bartender set the freshly filled vessel in front of the avian, Fox's eyes centered on the five credit chip Falco slapped on the bar.

"Hey Falco," Fox started, eyeing his friend. "Where'd you get the pocket change?"

"Saving it for a rainy day," Falco shrugged. "And by rainy, I mean thirsty." He took a drink, then gestured towards the grey fox on the other side of his friend. "It's a shame we can't all be like captain moneybags over there."

"Sorry guys," Jason said with a laugh, pocketing his money. "I've only been with ya for a short week now. Haven't had time to acquire the 'poorer than sin' quality."

The three laughed at that, and for a brief moment, Fox could picture himself back in a Cornerian bar a few months ago, before they had even heard of Warlord Bauker or his alliance. Before Miyu had flown into their lives, and before Peppy went missing. Back when the evening's entertainment was provided by Falco drunkenly trying to pick up girls, and Fox flew as a different sort of wingman. The only thought on the vulpine's mind at the end of the night as he shoved the failed, inebriated suitor into a cab was whether or not Peppy had left a pot of caf on for him when he got back to the _Great Fox_. He'd still have a long night of checking bounty boards and job listings on the spaceport's mainframe.

Compared to what life had become recently, they seemed like easy days.

One thing was the same though; Slippy was conspicuously absent.

"So where's your little green friend?" Jason asked, eager to take the subject of the conversation off himself and his money.

"Slippy?" Falco replied. "Eh, probably still in Wolf's med bay. He's got a thing for that coyote girl I guess; barely left her side since they took her aboard. Hasn't even started working on that project he had us pick up the part on Shoana for. Not that he'd be here anyway. Slippy's what you'd call, um, boring."

"Hey now," Fox interjected, keeping it light with a smile, "Everyone's got their own idea of fun."

"Right. 'cept his idea is being boring."

"Scratch one bogey," Fox rolled his eyes, jumping clear of Falco's train of logic. He laughed. "Well, the stuff he does when he's 'being boring' has saved your hide more times than you probably know."

"Eh, I'll give him that," Falco admitted. He leaned forward, looking down at Jason. "Slip can be a genius sometimes. Still. A little social acclamation wouldn't kill him."

"I'll tell you what," Fox began, changing the subject. "I'm excited to meet this fiancé of Bill's. Didn't you say you went to academy with her, Jason?"

"Ah, I did. Sophie's a great gal," Jason replied, setting down his mug. "I've already told Falco here, but she has a habit of making you…_okay_ with things, ya know? Like things aren't going so badly after all. I dunno, maybe it's that smile of hers. S'infectious."

"Hopefully she ain't always sunshine and lollipops," Falco muttered. "The last thing we need is a twenty-four seven peptalk."

"Eh, it can get a bit much sometimes, I'll admit," Jason said, tilting his head back and forth. "But it's better than the alternative. Can't tell you how many times she saved me when I was considering dropping out of academy." He centered himself on his stool and adopted the cadence of a story teller.

"By my senior year there, my grades were slipping, I was failing tests…I just wasn't getting the material. I'd go to all night study sessions, and still come up in the bottom third of the class. So obviously, my academic standing was shot by that point. I was only passing by a hair." The fox leaned a little closer to his audience. "But Sophie used to tell me, whenever I'd get back to the apartment we all shared, 'Jason, what do you call someone who graduates from the Cornerian Academy last in the class?'"

Jason waited for emphasis. "'A Cornerian Academy graduate.' That meant something to me. My whole life I wanted to get that degree. And even if I was the last one to walk across that stage at the commencement ceremony, that certificate would be just as real as any other. All I had to do was graduate. And graduate I did."

Jason took a drink and laughed. "Not with flying colors, mind you. Hell, not with any colors for that matter; I graduated a sickly shade of gray. But I still remember her saying what she said. That was always her way, offering encouragement."

"Sounds like the kind of friend who pays for themselves," Fox commented, nodding with a smile. A little bit of optimism couldn't hurt the team. And he had a sneaking suspicion that, once reunited with Bill, Sophia would prove difficult to lose, anyway.

"Well good," Falco said with a smirk, turning his empty pockets out. "'Cuz _we_ certainly aren't paying for her."

* * *

"A…coma?"

The doctor nodded, his brown furred features furrowed in a sort of concern that was half sympathy for the young toad in front of him, and half detached, scientific interest regarding the equally young coyote on the cot. The wolf had one arm crossed over his white coat, supporting the elbow of the other arm as he stroked his chin in thought. His eyes held a steely gaze, centered on the face of the comatose patient, while she was wearing a serene expression that betrayed the severity of her injuries.

Linka's head was a hodgepodge of bandages, crisscrossing her face with white gauze and strips of cloth. A series of tubes snaked around the dressings, linking her mouth and nose to an artificial respirator, which filled the small room with a slow, steady _hiss_. The thin sheets of the cot covered most of her body, though a bit of the tattered flight suit she had been wearing when she was shot was still visible on her arms and chest, the dull green matching the subdued emotions of the room well.

"Yes," the doctor answered, glancing at a number of instrument displays attached to the cot's headboard. "The surgery was successful, and we got the remains of the bullet fragments removed, but there was some stubborn damage to the skull."

"S-stubborn?"

"Tough to repair," the doctor clarified, returning his gaze to Linka. "I'm afraid the cause of the coma is out of our reach for a diagnosis."

"But can't you _do _anything about it?" Slippy squeaked, frustrated by the doctor's disconnected attitude towards Linka.

"Not without a specialist, I'm afraid. Nobody short of a doctor trained in brain trauma would be able to do anything more for her than we already have. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have other…"

The doctor cast a glance towards Slippy, standing at his side. The toad was motionless, staring at Linka with his arms at his sides. His face was sullen, the lines of his expression curved downwards in the sudden realization that hope was slipping away from him. The diminutive mercenary lacked sleep by the look of his eyes; sagging bags of skin had begun to show themselves, and his skin had the slightly shiny, imperfect feel to one who had gone a little too long without a shower. It suddenly dawned on the wolf that it was entirely possible that the toad hadn't left the room since he last checked up on the coyote the night before.

The doctor lifted a hand, gently patting Slippy's shoulder as he pitied the toad. "I'm…sorry, son. We'll keep doing everything we can for her. As long as a more vital case doesn't come along, she'll have this room as long as it's needed."

The wolf left after another moment of silence, striding out of the small, single cot room and closing the door softly behind him.

Slippy stood as he did for a long time. Or at least it felt like a long time; there weren't any clocks or chrono displays in the room, so it was impossible to tell for sure. Finally, as his legs began to ache in protest, he took a few steps back and fell into one of the chairs lined up against the wall. His feet came up off the ground as he sat, hanging in the air due to his height. His elbows fell to his knees, and his face fell into his hands.

'_This is my fault.' _The thought echoed through his mind like a desperate shout off the walls of a canyon. _'This is _my _fault.'_

Images from the Blood Tip raid on the _Great Fox_ played through his mind as Slippy's fingers rubbed his closed eyelids, though none were so merciful as to be a flash or glimpse. Every scene was instead replayed in excruciating detail, allowing him to witness every moment of how he had failed Linka. It was like a waking nightmare, the pictures breathtakingly real and yet entirely unsubstantial at the same time. His mind was swimming through a substance both numbingly empty and impossibly full.

The leader of the raiding party, standing over the fallen coyote with a gun to her head.

The handgun in the toad's own hand, given to him long ago by Fox but never used since.

The hesitation, the sudden weight of the trigger against his clammy finger.

The pair of simultaneous gunshots.

Running frantically to the pair of bodies. And then…

Then…

Slippy pressed his fingers into his eyelids a little harder, trying to physically rub the image of Linka lying on the _Great Fox_'s deck from his memory. All that blood. All that hesitation.

Of all the people who had crossed the team's path in the weeks leading up to that fateful day, Linka was someone special. Someone who Slippy could relax around. Someone who was okay sitting in the background and doing her own thing, much like he imaged he was to her. Somehow, they ended up in such a situation more often than one would think was average. And that last time, when the whole team went to Shoana, she had asked to stay aboard the ship. He still remembered the thrill that shot through him when he heard. She wanted to stay aboard the _Great Fox _with him. She clearly enjoyed his quiet company too.

'_So why,'_ Slippy thought. '_Why did I hesitate_?' A man was threatening the very life he had come to value, and yet, he couldn't pull the trigger fast enough to save her. The weight was beginning to settle over him, like a hand slowly clutching his heart. He sniffed back a tear.

"Why did I hesitate, Linka?" he wondered aloud. The only other presence in the room was the comatose girl, so he wasn't expecting any answer; he just needed to hear someone talk. So it was perplexing to say the least when he got a response.

"Beats me."

Slippy's eyes shot open and he looked up at the source of the familiar voice. He didn't remember anyone coming into the small medical room.

Linka lay on the cot as she had all night, chest slowly rising and falling with regularity. But she also sat beside the cot, up on the backrest of an identical chair opposite Slippy with her back against the wall, her boots on the seat cushion itself. She was watching herself on the cot with interest, as if herself trying to figure out how she could be in two places at once. Sitting as she was, Slippy could clearly see her altered flightsuit, the same as the one on the body on the cot.

The second Linka must have noticed Slippy's suddenly erratic breathing and wide eyed stare somehow, as she turned her head slightly to look at him. Her eyes were the same innocent blue as he remembered, honest and true but capable of mischief; the fur around her face the same molten gold. Save the presence of both pointed, white tipped ears, and the absence of any bandages or scars, she was identical to the being on the cot.

The second Linka smirked. "Boo."

Slippy was frozen. The sort of frozen he used to feel when he was a child and would glance around his dark room at night, positive something was watching him. This wasn't possible. She was there on the cot. She was on the chair. For a moment, his brain tried to fit what he was seeing and hearing into his view of how reality worked, but the result was the mental equivalent of grinding gears together.

"Who…_w-what _are you?" he whispered, wanting desperately to look away, to remove the affront to basic actuality from his sight so his mind could start rebuilding his sanity, but utterly unable to.

The second Linka shrugged, tilting her head in a motion of sympathy. "You tell me, Slip. You're creating me right now."

Slippy finally blinked. "I am?"

"Sure are," she replied, leaning forward and standing from the chair. "Watch. Close your eyes and wish me away."

Slippy couldn't close his eyes fast enough, and it seemed being given the command to do so released him from whatever shock induced paralysis had come over him. A few moments of silence passed before he even thought about reopening them. He had half expected a disembodied voice to tell him to do so. Slowly, gradually, he opened one eye and looked at the seat the being calling herself Linka had sat in.

Empty.

He quickly opened the other eye and breathed out in relief. Whatever had just happened, he wasn't sure he could find a satisfying answer for it, nor did he think he would be able to. He looked around, seeing Linka as she was supposed to be, comatose on the cot. As he closed his eyes again though, he thought he saw a smear of gold fur out of the corner of them, in the seat next to him. Against his better judgment, he quickly turned and looked.

"Gotcha," Linka said with a grin, her muzzle about a handspan away from his face.

"Gah!" Slippy cried, fumbling over the small armrest of his chair and falling to the floor, his flight reflex taking control in spectacular fashion. His nerves were lightning, tingling with the chill of a near death experience.

The second Linka, now sitting in the chair next to the one Slippy had just previously occupied, laughed a sweet, gentle laugh, her blue eyes sparkling with amusement. "I'm sorry Slip, but c'mon, how could I not?"

Slip continued to back up, sliding on his rear until his back fell flush with the wall. His eyes were transfixed on the coyote; it seemed as though the longer he stared, the more his usual skepticism for paranormal events began to fade.

To his horror, Linka stood, passing her unconscious self on the cot and taking a few steps toward the fallen toad. The wall kept Slippy from backing up any further, but as the apparition approached, he suddenly wished he could melt into the seams of the metal bulkhead.

She put one hand on her knee, and reached down with the other, extending it towards Slippy to help him up. Her tail wagged as it always had; her smile was just as warm. But there was still something very _off _about her. Slippy slowly lifted hand to take hers, part of him begging himself not to, preparing to be hoisted up.

But when his hand was supposed to touch hers, it passed right through. He didn't feel cold, or a sudden chill rush through his veins. It was as though her hand was a projection; an unflickering, extremely realistic hologram.

Her lips parted to include her teeth in her smile. "See? Not gonna hurt you, alright?"

She stood straight again, somehow prompting Slippy to do the same. He rose to his feet, looking up at Linka's face, studying it for something he wasn't really sure of. She just stared back, her smile ever present and unchanging.

"Linka, I…" he trailed off, shaking his head. He was talking to a ghost. He didn't even believe in ghosts. His voice was shaking. "I want you to g-go away."

Her smiled faded into a look of concern. "But-"

"Please," Slippy croaked. "If you're really in my head, I need you to g-go away now."

As he closed his eyes, he thought he saw her frown a little, but when he opened them again, she was gone.

Slippy held his breath, unwilling to believe it initially. He half expected to see her standing behind him, but when he twisted around, there was only the wall. He took about the room again. There was Linka, unconscious on the cot, her breathing still coming in slow and regular. The rhythmic sounds of monitoring equipment were just as before. His chair was a little askew from when he fell from it, but otherwise, the room was back to normal.

And yet somehow, Slippy didn't trust it.

Falco arrived at the room a few minutes later.

"Hey Slip, Bill's on approach and…"

The avian stopped, twisting his lips in confusion. From where he was, half leaning into the room, he couldn't see anyone, save Linka on the cot. He had been so sure the toad would be here; the stubby mechanic hadn't been anywhere else save the _Great Fox_'s engine room and the small medical room since arriving on the _Lone Wolf _back in Meteos.

"Slippy?" he asked the room quizzically.

The toad popped up from the opposite of the cot, apparently having been laying down on the floor. "Hm?" he intoned, as though it was perfectly normal.

Falco laughed. "Um, what're you doing back there?"

"Checking under the cot for…" he trailed off. What could he say? Falco already razzed him enough for pretty much everything, and the toad didn't really feel like adding 'halucinations' to the list. But he couldn't think of anything to say.

A moment of silence passed.

"Well whatever, let's go," Falco finally said. "Fox wants to talk to everyone once Bill and company get aboard."

* * *

"It's _ridiculously_ good to see you again," Fox grinned, grabbing his friend in a hearty embrace, slapping his back.

"Hey there Fox," Bill replied as he disengaged, his lips curled in a weary but accomplished smile. "Hope we didn't worry you too much, eh?"

The group of beings gathered in the _Lone Wolf_'s hanger consisted mostly of the Star Fox team and their recently returned Cornerian friends. A few of Wolf's men walking through the bay on one errand or another paused briefly to wonder why a pair of green and white CDF fighters were sitting on their skids on their ship, but given the _Great Fox _sitting not far away, it was easy to chalk up to another of the strange sightings the Warlord's ship had sported recently.

Rhena Haggerty and Bill Grey stood with their backs to their fighters, Bill wearing the same clothes he had borrowed from Fox long ago, and Rhena some new, utilitarian fashion from Fortuna's colder climates. Neither of them looked for lack of sleep, seeing as they probably took turns leading the other's fighter on autopilot, though both had the sort of slightly jittery restlessness that came from sitting in the tight confines of their cockpits for far too long.

Fox said, "Not really; I was more worried about the loss of a couple snubfighters." His continued smile robbed the jab of any malice.

"Is this everyone?" Rhena asked, tilting her head and causing her fiery red bangs to sway a little. Her hair, still short from the retrieval of the _Transient_'s schedule from Corneria, was tied into a ponytail.

Fox looked around him. Falco and Slippy accompanied the vulpine, all three of them dressed in their team's usual mix of greens, reds and blacks. The avian's presence was something to notice; Fox had doubted Falco's ability to get up so early in the morning to welcome Bill and his entourage back, much less dressed in a semi respectable fashion.

"No," Fox replied, returning his gaze to the dark furred wolf. "Miyu, Katt and Jason are all back on the _Great Fox_, either waking up or getting there."

"Jason?" a new voice from the direction of the CDF fighters said. "As in, Jason Mierse?"

The chestnut canine climbing down the ladder Wolf's techs had provided moved with the sort of gradual pace of one who had just woken up. Her muzzle was a darker color than the rest of her, matching the darker color of her short hair which was suffering from a mild case of bed-head. She reached the bottom of the ladder and took a moment to stretch, working out the numerous kinks that had arisen since falling asleep in such tight confines as those she had shared with Bill for the last day or so of travel.

As she turned and jogged towards the group of pilots, Fox could see her hazel eyes flashing with excitement. Her 'Cornerian Green' military fatigues were loose fitting and comfortable, clearly chosen with her long trek of discomfort in a shared cockpit in mind. Her smile was bright and wide, as if she couldn't think of anywhere else in all of Lylat to be.

"I'm sorry," Bill said to her, extending his arm to the canine as she neared and draping it over her shoulder. "I didn't want to wake you up." She gave him a quick peck on the cheek and suddenly his smile matched her own.

"Well then how would I meet your friends?" she asked, beaming first at the hound, then at the mercenaries gathered around. "Hiya! I'm Sophie."

"Fox," the vulpine said, offering his hand and giving hers a polite shake. "It's good to finally meet you. Bill's told us…well, not much to be honest." Fox's smile turned sheepish and he scratched the back of his head. "Though given the circumstances I can't blame him."

Sophie laughed, tossing a glance at Bill. "Yeah…but things have certainly taken an interesting turn, haven't they?"

"Definitely." Fox couldn't believe the sudden change in attitude. The last time he had seen Bill about a week ago, he had been a silent, sullen rock. It was almost as if a rain cloud was floating over his head. Now, despite, or perhaps because of, the daring rescue he was sure had taken place, Bill stood before them a changed man. His expression seemed eternally happy, and his posture, despite the discomfort of sitting in a cockpit for a day, was straight and proud. It was as though he had been made whole again, and the more Fox thought about it, the more that description made sense.

Sophia went on, Falco and a surprisingly confused looking Slippy introducing themselves in turn. Falco had whispered in Fox's ear moments before the Cornerians arrived that he had found Slippy by Linka's bedside in the _Lone Wolf_'s medical ward, and that he was acting a little more wired than usual.

"So where's Linka?" Bill asked earnestly as Sophia stepped back from greeting Slippy.

Fox's mouth froze. "Er, she's in Wolf's medical bay." How could he tell his friend the full truth? The mercenary could honestly say that he had never seen Bill so happy as he was at the moment, surrounded by his friends and fiancé, now safe under his arm. How could he bring the hound down by telling him another of his squadron's survivors was fading? Fox made a snap decision, and hoped he would be able to find a quieter moment sometime to break the full news. "She's stable, though she's gonna be out for awhile."

Bill's smile faded a little, but he nodded and Falco and Slippy stayed quiet, catching on to Fox's thoughts in a moment of groupthink, though Slippy may have just not been paying attention. The toad began staring off into space again at the mention of the coyote's name.

"Speaking of which," Fox continued, delicately easing the topic away from the comatose pilot. "Hope you didn't get too much a shock when Rhena told you about our situation. Or when you found out where we were hiding."

Bill laughed. "I'm not sure anything could have prepared me for _this._" He gestured around the massive hanger with his other hand, taking in the entirety of the _Lone Wolf _in one motion. "Star Fox and Star Wolf flying together; I never thought I'd see _that _day."

"I was on a medical team that followed the liberation of our Fortuna outpost from Venom," Sophie said, remembering back to the Lylat War. "Some of the survivors from the base you guys saved saw your dogfights with Star Wolf overhead; they said it was like watching a ballet." She turned to Fox with an accusing smile, pointing a finger at him. "And they said _you_ flew into the base to disarm the time bomb a Venomian agent had planted. Said there was only a few minutes left on the timer when you found it."

"It's a hell of a story," Falco agreed, nodding with a smile at Fox's discomfort under the praise. He looked back at Sophie with a slightly quizzical look. "And yet we don't hear it often enough. How did you know about us? I thought the big Green denies our 'participation' in that war." He waggled his fingers when he said the word 'participation' for sarcastic effect.

"William told me all about Lylat's most underrated mercenaries on the way here," she said, glancing at Bill with a sly smile, as though she were telling a secret. "I think its criminal you fellas don't get any recognition for everything you did. A paycheck couldn't have been enough."

Falco grinned, folding his arms. He looked at Bill. "Well I'm satisfied. She can stay."

Bill wiped his brow with his free hand, feigning a look of relief.

"Well, you're only partially right there Bill," Fox said, steering the conversation back towards his original aim. "We aren't quite flying _together. _Not yet. But I got an interesting offer from Wolf which might change that, and which would benefit all parties involved."

"All parties?" Bill asked tentatively.

Fox nodded, crossing his arms. "Yep. Wolf would get to keep his outfit, we would get closer to finding where Peppy's being held…and a lot of Gage's and Bauker's men will probably die, and Cornerian soldiers survive as a direct result." He eyed Rhena, catching her sudden, razor sharp gaze of interest.

"A _lot _of them."

* * *

A/N:

**chaos leader:** Thanks for the review and kinds words, buddy. And don't worry about the power armor; I agree with you, and I've got some plans on future chapters which may or may not showcase some weaknesses of such a piece of hardware. In this particular case though, they were up against the equivalent of corporate security. Dedicated, sure, but not quite as well armed or versed in tactics. So of course a mechanized (para)military will tear them apart. And as for being a stranger...as much as I would like to have more of a presence here, I just don't have the time I used to have to spend on this site. This story is about all I can manage, and I can barely do that as the update dates can tell you :)

**Wanderling: **Thanks W! It's much appreciated.

**XxSanitariumxX: **Thanks for the reviews Sanitarium; hopefully the story will live up to those generous words.

As always, thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read this story.

-Irish Redd**  
**


	31. Chapter 31: Bonds

**XXXI: **Bonds

The omnipresent crimson paw print of Wolf's forces sprang to life in the holoprojector dish, floating at eye level and slowly bobbing up and down.

Fox tapped his datapad, arranging some things behind the scenes and activating the briefing room lights. They dimmed as the last of the attendees arrived, filing into the small room and gathering around the rim of the ceiling-facing dish. Though the only image it projected was red, the various sources of illumination within the display cast gentle, bluish light up into their faces, revealing their identities as Fox looked up from his pad and glanced around.

Falco and Slippy stood on either side of him, the former to his right showing a look of vague boredom as he leaned on the dish's railing – probably due to the early morning hour – while the latter on his left continued to star aimless into space. Ever since Falco had found the toad in Linka's medical room, he had had the feel of someone who had just seen a ghost about him, something that concerned Fox to a good degree. To see Slippy so still and unenthused was simply unnatural.

On the other side of Falco was the Cornerian contingent of his team, three of them engaged in a quiet discussion about some past experience or another. Sophie stood between the two males, the center of attention for obvious reasons. The three of them chatting together reminded Fox of flight school, back when Falco, Bill and he had been inseperable. He tried not to think about it too much though, knowing how easy it was to fall into a reverie of nostalgic memory.

Rhena stood beyond Bill, who himself was directly across the projector from the vulpine. There was a small distance between her and the rest of the Cornerians, and while Bill had tried to pull her into the conversation, she hadn't said much since they all arrived in the room. She had just stared at the projector in quiet contemplation.

Katt and Miyu strode in at that moment, closing the door behind them and taking up the space between Rhena and Slippy. Fox watched them come in, noticing their clothes almost immediately. While everyone else around the projector was dressed more or less as usual – lots of Cornerian green and casual mercenary 'uniforms' – the two girls looked like they had just come back from a shopping trip. Which, Fox remembered with a smirk from last night, they had.

Miyu had apparently appreciated Fox's normal look, possibly due to the fact that she had worn his borrowed clothes for so long, that she had decided to emulate it. The lynx had found a pair of green trousers very similar to his, which extended up from durable brown combat boots. A faded pink shirt covered her torso, which itself was topped by a yellowish green, short-sleeved flight jacket. The shirt was fitted, but otherwise the outfit was straight and to the point. She was a pilot. That was what she did.

Katt's, on the other hand, was nearly the opposite in every way. Her trip to Venture's limited clothing district had yielded a pair of tight blue denims and a bright yellow blouse that left her naval tantalizingly exposed. A red half-vest completed the outfit, which combined with her pink fur created a miasma of primary colors that somehow worked for her.

She noticed Fox looking at her and threw him a wink, causing a bit of blush in the vulpine that was thankfully hidden by the dim lighting conditions of the room.

Fox smiled, turning his attention down to his datapad and tapping one more item before looking back up.

Taking a breath, he began the process of informing the team of everything that Wolf O'Donnell had told him, stretching back to when they first met in Meteos for the Cornerians who weren't around, up to what he had learned the day before in speaking with Warlord Siona. He watched their reactions, gauging their thoughts as he went on and trying to guess where their hearts would lay when he asked his big question at the end.

The Cornerians were shocked when Fox explained Admiral Gage's betrayal and subsequent alliance with Warlord Bauker. Reactions amongst them ranged from utter disbelief to the smoldering embers of rage. Fox noticed Rhena in particular, her eyes threatening to bore right through his skull as he listed off compelling pieces of evidence of the Admiral's treachery to Corneria. As he described Wolf's speech on the matter, any skepticism began to evaporate, leaving behind only anger. He envied the four former representatives of the Cornerian military for their passion; as a mercenary, it was rare that he had the chance to develop such dedication to a cause.

He described Warlord Bauker's coalition, the group of post-Venom despots and leaders who had banded together in secret, while fooling the various free planetary armed forces into believing they were fighting amongst themselves. Ypson, Norwood, Blue Arrow, the entire Cornerian Seveth Fleet; how they were all plotting to overthrow Corneria, which had risen to Lylat's primary power after Andross' defeat.

The vulpine explained more about Wolf himself, going into detail about the lupine's goal in the coming conflict, how he sought not an ideaology or political gain, only a continuation of the status quo. It was a difficult position to explain, and one that drew a lot of doubt based on the faces looking back at him, but Fox professed his confidence that, at the very least, Wolf didn't have power-grabbing or malevolent motives at heart.

Finally, he announced Wolf's offer, given to him the day before after his visit to Discord with Warlord Siona.

"We're to be commissioned as a mercenary unit, under the employ of Wolf," he said. "He's planning a good number of raids against Bauker's men, and he wants our help doing so. I know some of you are still hesitant about him, but I'll be involved in the planning stages of our contracts, and we'll operate independent of the rest of his forces. However, we'll answer to him as a unit. Payment and salvage will be the standard deal, proportional to our makeup of a contract's total committed units."

Fox braced himself on the railing of the projector dish, taking one more moment to gather his last thoughts. At that moment, he had ideas and inklings as to what the response would be from everyone gathered around the projector to his final question, but he couldn't know for sure. He was suddenly a little afraid of what might happen when he was done speaking.

"I can't ask any of you to help us out here," he said plainly, looking to each of them in turn. " But Falco, Slippy and I have already agreed to take his offer. Almost two months ago, Peppy Hare was taken from us by Bauker, and this seems like the best and only way to get him back. I won't go into it, as most of you know our feelings on the matter, but that alone is reason enough for us."

"I don't know much about the coming weeks and months," Fox admitted, lowering his gaze for a moment. "I do know that they will be dangerous, though. These aren't smugglers or backwater militias we're talking about here. These are the trained remnants of Venom's armada, and the perhaps better trained former pilots of the Cornerian Seventh Fleet. I do know that we'll be put into the thick of things. And I do know that it is very likely that we will lose people."

The mercenary captain looked up again, focusing on Bill and Rhena in particular. His orange fur seemed to shimmer for a brief second in the cast off light from the projector. "But I also know that we'll be throwing a hell of a wrench into Bauker's machine here. And that our bounties aren't disappearing anytime soon."

With that, the room fell silent save the quiet hum of the projector mechanisms before them. Nearly every face was turned towards the placeholder hologram, furrowed eyes starring into deep expanses of thought. While some knew most of the story already, and others were brand new to it, all were suddenly forced to question their presence aboard the _Lone Wolf_, and whether they were willing to make it a position of purpose.

Perhaps unsurprisingly to the vulpine, the first response came from Bill. The hound suddenly looked up from his reverie, staring at the mercenary.

"I'm in," the former Cornerian Flight Sergeant said resolutely, eyes flashing in the dim light. He offered no explanation, but he didn't need to. Fox already knew the call to take up arms and represent his home planet, even when that world's own military was still in the dark, was something born into the hound. It was why he couldn't join Fox when the vulpine left the academy to take his father's place as captain of the Star Fox mercenary troupe.

Sophie placed a hand on Bill's, offering Fox a determined, serious expression that seemed rather odd on the canine. "Count me in, too," she said, squeezing her fiance's paw with her own.

Bill glanced at Rhena on his other side, locking eyes with her as they exchanged not a word. A moment passed before the wolf nodded firmly, dipping her chin once and turning to glare at Fox, daring him to refuse her a place on his team.

"Well hell," Jason said with a laugh, stretching his arms back as if he were just waking up, and not making a decision that could potentially lead to his death. "Wouldn't be right to be the odd man out, eh? Consider this combort aboard."

Sophie looked at her friend and smiled, placing her other hand on his as it fell back to the railing. Under less serious circumstances, Fox could see her jumping a little as the connection between the Cornerians – even Rhena – was suddenly reinforced. Given the situation though, her smile just grew larger, and Fox suddenly gained another four teammates.

Which left the two females to his left.

Katt was the first to speak up, drawing Fox's attention away from Miyu's somber contemplation. She made an indecisive humming noise for a moment, canting her head back and forth as if grudgingly choosing between desserts at a dinner hall.

"Why not?" she finally said, tilting her head one final time and shrugging. The feline looked at Fox. "It'll pay more than Rishad ever did, and'll probably be _way_ more exciting. You've got yourself Lylat's prettiest mechanic, hon."

Falco grumbled something to Fox's right, but the silence after drew him straight to Miyu.

The lynx was the one unknown in the equation, with the possible exception of Katt. Fox had correctly assumed everyone else's decisions to stay with him, but they all had loyalties, either to the greater cause or to each other. And even Katt was more likely to lean his way than the other, having known the Star Fox team for so long. Even with Falco's presence.

Miyu's loyalties, however, were unknown.

Fox had spent a good deal of time before assembling everyone in the room thinking about the lynx, and why she was still there. Why she had come back in the first place back on Corneria. He had gotten to know her better since then, enough to trust that she wouldn't be lying in wait with a wrench again anytime soon, but there was still something mysterious about her; something _off_. He put the feeling in the same category as how he felt about Wolf. Enough trust to believe his words and have faith in what he'd do, but not without some measure of reservation.

The night a few weeks ago in his room still floated through his mind every once in awhile, how surprised he was when she whispered those words in his ear. At the time, he thought she was either going to bite him, or, even more bizarrely, plant her lips on his cheek. So when neither happened, and those words came out of her mouth, his mind had been temporarily shaken loose.

_'I don't _have _anyone else...'_

Ever since then it had been as though she had always been part of the team. A certain bruise on his forehead refused to let him forget her past actions, but otherwise she had proven her dedication plenty of times.

But now, when it was made obvious that her decision to stay could directly lead to her death, he couldn't be sure what she would decide.

Her eyes reflected the wolf's paw projection in front of her, but they wavered a bit as she nodded, slowly at first but firm and resolute when she stopped and looked at Fox.

"Yeah," she said with a bit of a smile.

Fox's expression suddenly matched her own, and he glanced around the room at everyone. His teammates. His comrades in arms. His _friends_.

"Alright then," he said, not trusting himself to say anything further, so sudden the rush of pride had swept over him. He remembered he had actual information to display on the projector though, and grabbed his datapad. "Let's get started." He tapped a few choices, and the paw print faded away, replaced by a grid of glowing wireframes which resolved themselves into models of fighters and various ships.

"I've assembled our current ship count here," he said, tapping another button and highlighting the topmost of four rows, which displayed the wireframes of four familiar looking fighters. One of them expanded to fill half the projection, while the other half displayed armaments and loadout information.

"First up, the Arwings," he said. "Three of the four we have will make up our primary fighter/bomber flight, with the last one in reserve for spare parts. Slippy, I hate to ask this of you, but unfortunately this isn't the Lylat War; we're not under Cornerian contract, so we don't have access to their endless supply of replacement parts. And Arwing components aren't exactly common."

Fox had been dreading the next thought he'd have to express, but when he saw Slippy's lack of reaction to what he was hinting at, he went on without hesitation. "So seeing as you've already told me you'd rather engineer than fly, we'll be cannibalizing your Arwing." He paused, expecting something in the toad's head to snap, but there was nothing. The small mechanic just stared into the projector, lost in thought.

"Y-yeah," he said suddenly, looking at Fox like he had just woken up. He blinked rapidly. "No, I...I understand."

Fox nodded slowly, making a note to himself to ask Slippy exactly what was going on with him. If the toad's stoic attitude had worried the vulpine before, his apparent willingness to give up his own fighter downright scared Fox.

"Alright," he went on, filing his thoughts away. "So that's our main flight. Miyu, Falco and myself will pilot." Miyu and Falco's expressions lightened and soured a little, respectively. Fox then tapped his pad again, bringing back the grid of ships and this time focusing in on the second row.

Similar to the first, the second row contained a series of four snubfighter wireframes. However, unlike the first, they weren't all uniform in shape. Three of the four could be easily identified as the thinner, more agile CDF fighters Bill's squadron flew. Their wings and hulls were decidedly _spindly _in nature, giving them their apt look of a fast, fragile bird.

However, the fourth fighter in the row was completely different. Baring two pairs of swept forward wings, sprouting from the rear of the fuselage, the final craft was split down the middle horizontally. It looked dangerous, as if its edges were sharp enough to cut.

"Who's ship is that?" Sophie asked, recognizing the outlines of the fighters her fiance flew, but not the last one.

"Mine," a new voice said from the back of the room, just inside the door. Most everyone snapped to look at him as he walked into the light of the projector, making his way into the space Bill and Rhena created for him.

Beta Rhade strode into view with purpose, appearing indifferent to all of the pairs of eyes on him. Dressed in a formal black and red uniform, his grey and white muzzle wore an expression of slight contempt, as if he would rather be somewhere else. When he came to a stop, close enough to the projector to be seen clearly in its light, but still outside the circle, he let his hands rest at the small of his back. He looked at Fox expectantly.

"Everyone, this is our newest pilot," the vulpine said, lifting a hand to gesture. "Rhade will be joining us as an observer for Wolf as we carry out our contracts, and will be the point of contact for anything that needs to get back to the Warlord."

"I've also been cleared to fly with you in your sorties," the Beta added, eyeing the wireframe of his Wolfen Mk. I with a hint of pride. "I'll follow the tactical orders of Mr. McCloud; however, I am not one of you mercenaries. I answer to Lord O'Donnell outside of combat."

"We'll try not to disappoint you to much then," Falco offered with a sneer, taking offense to the Beta's snobbish tone.

"Appreciated," Rhade said with a sincere nod. "But I won't get my hopes up."

"Rhade'll be flying with Bill and Rhena in our second flight, with Bill as flight leader," Fox interrupted before an argument could begin, forcing Falco to settle for glaring at the Beta. Fox went on. "Your CDF fighters are a bit quicker than the Arwings, so you'll tangle with the snubfighters for most of our contracts. Without warheads they won't be able to do much damage against bigger ships anyway."

"Fair enough," Bill agreed. "What about Linka's fighter?"

"It will be used as a backup...until she gets back on her feet, of course," Fox said, quickly saving himself from the short pause as he briefly forgot that Bill didn't know of her full medical perdicament. Bill nodded, apparently satisfied with the answer, and the vulpine mentally breathed out as he dodged a proverbial bullet. Fox listened as the moment of silence turned into a stretch. "Good. Moving on."

The holographic grid reappeared, with the focus this time on the third row, consisting of three ships of completely different makes.

The first carried the label _POS _beneath it, and very quickly made itself out to be the rickety old shuttle the Star Fox team had purchased during their time spent avoiding bounty hunters. While the wireframe precluded any sight of the dirty, tarnished hull of the craft, the outline it provided gave enough away. With its boxy frame and smooth, generous curves, it was clearly an outdated civilian model, and had no place in the arsenal of a combat unit.

The second was just the opposite of the first: a shuttle with sharp, angular features and a modern design. The label _Blood Tip _was displayed beneath it, bringing back memories for those who were present while boarding the _Great Fox _after the hostile mercenary troupe's failed attempt to take it over. Shaped like a standard atmospheric fighter of old, pre-space times, though fatter in the middle, the ship wasn't only fierce in appearance; it was equipped with a good number of electronic weapons and countermeasure systems.

Finally, the third craft in the row of shuttles was, at first glance, not a shuttle at all, but rather a modified snubfighter. The basic chassis was that of a Venomian _Invader III _class fighter, but the cockpit had been stretched backward and widened a bit, creating a space large enough for the pilot to stand up and stretch out in, if barely. Cargo pods could be seen strapped underneath the hull as well, adding the bulk. The title _Cat's Paw_ floated beneath the image, and Katt hummed a little noise of pride as the homemade light freighter got its turn in the holographic spotlight.

"These shuttles make up our non-combat assets," Fox reported. He gestured to the first one, saying its name phonetically, as opposed to as the acronym it was. "The _Pos, _I'm sure you'll be sad to hear, will be sold off as soon as possible. Wolf hasn't paid us anything yet, and we could use the credits."

"Aw, say it ain't so," Falco laughed, joining with Bill's chuckle and, surprisingly enough, Rhena's smile. "There's a lot of memories in that rust bucket. Mostly of us almost dying on take off."

"I know, I know," Fox smirked, pushing his hands out as if to wave off the coming sob stories. "But you'll be equally _happy _to know that the shuttle those Blood Tip fellas so graciously left in our custody is very nearly a combat ship. We'll have Slippy and Katt look 'er over for a full roster of capabilities, but it should definitely serve our needs from here on out."

"You got it Tiger," Katt said, saluting the mercenary captain and tossing another wink. "Slip and I will get right on it. Ain't that right, hon?"

She nudged Slippy where he stood next to her, trying to get a smile out of the morose toad but failing utterly. He merely readjusted himself, continuing to stare his blank stare into the projector. Katt's smile quickly faded and she looked around, as if trying to get confirmation from someone else that she had actually made contact with him.

"And then of course there's Katt's ship," Fox concluded, catching the feline's attention again. "I'm going to have you move it to the _Great Fox_'s auxilery bay when you get the chance; we've got to make room in the main for Rhade's fighter."

"Sure," Katt replied, stretching the word, still shaken a bit from Slippy's lack of a response.

Fox said, "Alright then." He tapped the pad one last time, showing the final, bottom row of the grid as it zoomed into a full color, holographic image of the _Great Fox_. However, as the assembled group watched the image slowly bob up and down, its color faded from its traditional whitish-grey to solid black, with the red accents typical of Wolf O'Donnell's fleet. The sprinting, pre-evolved fox emblem on the dorsal fin likewise faded into Wolf's telltale insignia.

When the bloody paw print finally snapped into focus, Falco cleared his throat. "Eh-ehm. Er...what's the deal with _that_?" he asked, gesturing towards the hologram while casting a glance at Fox.

Fox took a deep breath. "Its what we'll be spending tomorrow doing," he said. Explaining further, he went on. "The _Great Fox _is far too recognizable a ship to risk taking on contracts. Not because of the fights we'll get in at the actual site, but more because of the risk in running into bounty hunters or vigilantes along the way. Same goes for the Arwings. So to that end, Wolf and I have agreed to purchase and install sensor bafflers to install in our hardware, as well as the paint jobs. The bafflers will make it seem like we're part of Wolf's crew to any prying software, and the new look will fool any visual scans...to a point."

Fox noticed the look of disgust on Falco's face, as if he just ate something on a dare. "Neither'll stand up to a close pass, though, so we'll still have to play it careful."

"Same goes for our mounts?" Rhena asked with a deadpan stare.

"Yeah," the mercenary replied. "Your CDF fighters are a bit more common on the black market, so you won't need the bafflers, which cost a pretty credit, but the paint job'll apply to them as well. To anyone who doesn't look too close, we'll look like one of Wolf's task forces. To that end, since he's a known lieutenant of O'Donnell, Rhade'll be taking and making any comm calls to add to the charade."

From the edge of the projector's light, Wolf's pilot nodded once, accepting Fox's statement.

"Now, I'm sure you, Bill and Rhena, will be especially interested in the target of our first paid mission under Wolf," Fox said with a sly smile. The pair of Cornerians listened expectantly. "Major Wilkins."

The strain of Rhena's tightened grip on the railing could practically be heard as the fox uttered the name. Bill likewise cringed a little, recalling the memories of the former Cornerian officer. He had been the one to greet them back on Yohan Depot, so many weeks ago, before any of those gathered around the projector knew about the Seventh Fleet's defection to Warlord Bauker. The Major had been the one to lead them all into the trap that had killed Bill's pilot Cratz, and nearly taken the rest of the group down as well.

"Traitor," Rhena growled under her breath, barely audible.

"The Major has become something of an assistant to Warlord Bauker," Fox explained, bringing up the leopard's face on the projector. "According to Siona, he's played ambassador to a number of smaller militias and errant groups, persuading them to join with Bauker's alliance. He's also proven quite able in his administrative abilities, running a number of Bauker's less important organizations and front companies. And he's currently on Siona's Waypoint Station, here in Sector Y."

The projection changed again, this time fading into an overhead view of the Lylat System. A box appeared around the glowing yellow shape of Sector Y, expanding until a section of it covered the projection. Within the new picture, the images of a few stations, as well as the planetoid Discord, resolved themselves. One of the outlying stations, a distance from the others and close to the water planet Aquas, sprouted the label 'Waypoint.'

"Again, according to Siona, he's requested a personal meeting with her. For a small fee, she's offered to take her time reaching him, meaning he'll be staying on Waypoint for a few more days. This will give us time to outfit, prepare, and intercept him as he's leaving the station after the meeting."

"_After _the meeting?" Jason asked tentatively, raising an eyebrow. "Why not have Siona's guards just shoot him? I'm ah...I'm new to this sort of thing though, so sorry if I'm missing something."

"Fair question," Fox agreed, reassuring the other vulpine. "Two reasons. Siona's refusing to take sides in this little war we're waging, even if its to stop the bigger war from starting. So if word somehow gets back to Bauker that Wilkins was killed onboard one of Siona's stations, it wouldn't be good for her, to say the least. And second, as Siona put it, she wants to 'tap him.'" Fox gave air quotes to the phrase. "See what information she can sneak out of him while they're discussing whatever it is they're discussing."

"And it couldn't hurt to know where he's coming from before we space 'im," Miyu pondered aloud. "In the radiation of the cloud we could probably pace behind him a bit as he's leaving, see what his trajectory says about his destination."

Fox blinked, smiling a little. He hadn't thought of that. "That's a good point, too," he offered. "I'll ask Siona if she can get someone to sneak a tracking beacon on the Major's ship before he takes off. Might cost us a bit, but it'd be worth it, and Wolf's payment'll more than make up for it."

"Okay," he finished, looking at each of those gathered around the projector in turn. He smirked a little. "Now, here's what I have planned for the good Major. Chime in if you've got any crazy ideas."

* * *

_'Alpha one-oh to Beta one-one...Alpha one-seven to Beta one-eight...Gamma oh-two to...to...'_

Slippy twisted the small, insulated wire lead in his fingers, trained eyes scanning the tangle of wires and circuits before him. Spilling out the side of a clunky, roughly cylindrical component about the size of the toad himself, the circuitry would be considered a hopeless mess to the uninitiated. With his experience and keen mind though, the job of untangling and properly connecting the various wires and chips was merely incredibly frustrating.

The diminutive mechanic consulted a datascreen, set up next to the component on the workbench in his room. Displayed on it was the technical schematic the component's wiring was supposed to follow. With the modifications Slippy had made to the component though, things didn't always match up the way they were shown. Tracing the digital wire on the screen to its terminus, he looked rapidly back and forth between it and the real wire in his hand.

_'So where does Gamma oh-two...?'_

"Here," Linka said, leaning across his field of vision and tapping the datascreen at another wire terminal. "At Theta oh-three."

Slippy stared at her hand, watching the fur and skin depress as it tapped the screen. He heard the sounds it made, but knew that if he reached out and tried to grab the flesh, it would phase right through him. Like trying to grab a hologram. Or a memory.

"Since when can y-you read tech docs?" he asked quietly, convincing his eyes to go back to work as he twisted the wire with the proper connection.

Linka turned around and leaned back against the workbench, beside Slippy's stool. She was wearing an off-white technician's jumpsuit, much like Katt's, but worn much more modestly than the feline's. A pair of soldering goggles was pushed up onto her brow. Her ears – both of them – were pricked with interest in the toad's work.

"I can't," she replied, crossing her arms. "At least I don't think I can. You saw that connection point earlier when you first scanned the doc; I just helped you remember is all."

"I b-barely looked at it then," Slippy returned, unable to keep a nervous edge out of his otherwise even voice.

She looked at him. "Our eyes catch a lot of things we don't realize at first."

Slippy didn't say anything more. He heard what the lynx had said, but was too busy simultaneously working and swallowing a growing nausea to think of a reply.

The fact that an impossible vision of his friend was standing next to him was brazenly flying in the face of the normally skeptic toad's sense of reality. Part of him was expecting to wake up from some extended dream, beginning in Linka's medical room and stretching through Fox's briefing. Another part of him was trapped in an endless loop of chills, as his rational mind continued screaming at him that she shouldn't exist. And a final part of him was on the edge of a mental collapse, being gradually consumed with grief at his friend's most likely fatal coma.

_'"Friend",' _he thought to himself and laughed, twisting another pair of wires together. It was a single, dark chuckle, an uncharacteristic noise for the normally upbeat, fidgety toad. '_After a month of barely talking to each other, I'm not sure we could even be considered-'_

"Friends?" Linka asked, finishing his thought and cocking her head. "Of course we were. Why else would I be here right now if we weren't?"

Slippy stopped, slowly putting down a soldering tool he had just picked up. He looked at her, a dead, emotionless expression plastered across his face. She looked back at him, her dark blue irises matching his stare as if it were a game. Her lips perked into a playful smile, but he only closed his bloodshot eyes, rubbing the lids with his palms. When he opened them again, her smile remained, but the rest of her face had begun to slacken.

"Link, I..." he trailed off, shaking his head slowly and averting his gaze to the workbench. He was suddenly at a loss of what to say. How does one tell a ghost they no longer want to see them? "I-I need to you to go now."

Linka's smile faded, dropping into a frown somewhere between disappointment and shame. "I'm not a ghost, ya know."

She unfolded her arms and stood upright, slowly making her way to the bed across the room from the workbench. She stepped around the myriad of half finished and partially disassembled projects that lay scattered across the floor, the pads of her bare feet quiet against the stiff carpeting. Once she reached the bed, she sat on the end, facing Slippy's back as he continued working.

Several minutes passed. At first he spared a glance over his shoulder every so often, watching the young coyote as she swung her feet aimlessly and let her gaze wander around the room. At one point, he thought he even heard her begin to hum, a simple little tune that he could have sworn he heard somewhere before.

But as time passed, he gradually forgot she was there, becoming so engrossed in his work that he scarcely noticed his eyelids begin to gain weight. The digits of the electronic clock on the counter top seem to leap ahead when he wasn't watching. He suddenly let out a long yawn as a wave of tiredness swept over him. He looked at the wire in his hand, like countless others he had connected, with exhausted frustration. As his energy left him, so did his wits.

"Need some help?" Linka piped up from behind him somewhere. "You look sleepy."

"I...no," Slippy replied, spinning around on his stool and looking at her. He shook his head rapidly, trying to wake himself up enough to stay coherent. "I need to stay awake. I need to finish assembling this capacitor from Shoana, or Fox won't be able to test...test it..."

She smiled, rising to her feet and padding her way back over to him. He watched her through a half closed eye, struggling with everything he had to stay awake and not fall off the stool.

"You've done enough, Slip," she said gently, standing before him for a moment before reaching behind him and grabbing hold of his stool's backrest. As she spun him around, back towards his work, she lowered her voice to a whisper as the toad finally began to lose consciousness. The last thing he felt was the warm breath of her quiet words echoing through his mind.

"Why don't you let me take over for awhile?"

* * *

"And Sophie just keeps going, talking about how confusing fashion can be sometimes, how this shirt doesn't go with those trousers; being a girl, she had no other choice, you see. Conversations just always seemed to end up there."

Jason leaned in a little as he explained the last bit, as if he were explaining something to a confidant. Sophie laughed a little and gave him a jokingly reproachful stare. Bill nodded sagely though, his arm around Sophie's shoulder on the couch.

"It's true," he said with the air of a scholar. "It's sadly just another defect of their gender." The slap he received from the canine under his arm was soft, but he reacted as though it were authentic. "Easy! Sheesh."

"Keep going," Miyu prompted Jason, her and Fox still anticipating the punchline of the story. The three of them sat in their own chairs, dragged over from elsewhere in the lounge of the _Great Fox _to surround one of the tables.

"Alright," Jason agreed, noticing the smiles preemptively tugging at their lips. "So there we are in the back of the cafe, Billy, Sophie, Sophie's brother and me, talking about how dressing yourself to look good is so hard. And just as some poor woman walks out of the washroom I say, 'Yeah, that's why I think the world would be better off without pants.'"

The five of them burst out laughing, filling the _Great Fox_'s lounge with the sounds of merriment. The stress of equipment checks, maintenance reports and any number of other tasks melted away, replaced instead by the weary satisfaction of a hard day of work. Preparations for the strike on Major Wilkins would continue into the next day, but for the time being, they could rest.

"And keep in mind," Jason went on, struggling to keep a level voice, "This woman has no idea what we were talking about, or that I was joking. As soon as I said that, I just stared at Billy here, doing everything I could to keep a straight face until the poor, poor, confused woman got far enough away."

"So all she hears is four kids talking about how much better life without pants would be?" Fox asked, grinning widely.

"Yep," Bill answered. "I'd die to find out what she was thinking as she walked away."

"Ugh," Fox offered, doing a ridiculous impersonation of an old lady. "Kids these days! No respect for the tradition of pants!"

Another round of laughs swept through the room. As they settled back down though, catching their breath, an odd thought occurred to Fox: other than Bill, everyone else was still somewhat of a stranger to him. Jason he had met only a few days ago, and Sophie just that morning. And Miyu, he knew, would always be somewhat of a stranger to the vulpine. But if he had been walking past the open lounge door at the moment, peaking inside, he would've guessed the group had been together forever.

It made Fox smile, and though he wasn't exactly sure why, he didn't really care.

"That was just before my brother shipped out," Sophie said, reminscing. "He always thought we were so weird."

"Mm," Bill said as he took a sip from his drink. "And he was right."

"So your brother's in the army too?" Miyu asked innocently, setting her own drink back on the table.

"Yep, the Cornerian Rangers," Sophie nodded, though her smile faded a little as she looked down for a moment. "Well, he was. Alai was killed during the Lylat War, at the Battle of Macbeth."

Fox's eyes narrowed a little as a mental image came flying from nowhere and attacked his mind.

The image of the smoke filled casket, suspended in another container on glowing, pulsing blue wires. Of the person inside it, fingers pressed against the clear material as if trying to make contact with the outside world. Of the card Miyu had taken, its typed letters as clear as day in his head. _Alai Arkanian._

"I'm...sorry to hear that," Miyu said slowly, glancing at Fox. In that instant, they both knew what the other was thinking.

"Don't be," Sophie said quickly, her brown eyes shimmering with pride as she smiled a little. "He died doing what he believed was right. He wouldn't have wanted it any other way."

"Forgive me if I'm prying, Sophie," Fox said slowly, feeling his words out. He briefly thought against asking what he was about to ask, but curiosity got the better of him and he pressed on. "But how did he die?"

"Breaching an installation," she answered. Her smile had disappeared at this point, and Fox noticed Bill's arm tighten a little around her shoulder. "His Lieutenant told me he had volunteered to be the first in, and got the first shots from the Venomians on the other side. We were good friends with the L.T., so he delivered the news in person. Said he saw it with his own eyes. Said Alai was...was a hero."

Her eyes began to well up, and Fox saw that he had probably overstepped the bounds of conversation. He regretted forcing her to confront those memories again, but he had heard what he needed to hear. A small period of respectful silence passed before Bill spoke up, putting his free hand on Sophie's as he looked around at them.

"Well, I think we should probably get to bed, eh?" he said lightly, trying to end the evening on a positive sounding note.

"That's a good idea," Fox quickly agreed, nodding and trying to do the same to the mood of the room. He stood, prompting the rest of them to do the same. "Why don't you guys get your stuff from the hanger and meet me at my room, and we'll figure you where to put you up for quarters."

"Sounds like a plan," Bill said, standing with Sophie. Her bubbly smile was beginning to return as she brushed a tear from her eye, again forcing Fox's conscious to gnaw at him a little. "Meet you there."

"I'll give you a hand," Jason offered, following the pair out of the lounge.

Fox and Miyu watched the three of them leave, disappearing out of the lounge door and making their way toward the _Great Fox_'s stairwell. Fox listened to their footsteps slowly fade, waiting to talk until their voices disappeared completely. Once they had, the torrent of words inside him sprang free like a leak in a damn, melding with Miyu's as their secret knowledge expressed itself.

"Alai wasn't dead," he said first, turning to the lynx and lowering his voice. "That guy in the casket was moving."

"He was _reacting_," Miyu corrected. "Remember? He wasn't only alive, he was conscious, at least at some level."

"But if the lieutenant was a family friend, why would he lie?"

"Maybe he wasn't lying."

"Come again? What other option is there? Clerical error?"

"I don't know. It's just...this doesn't like a conspiracy to you? All that..._whatever _the hell was in those containers? Technology?"

"I'm not sure what you're getting at, Miyu."

"I...I'll be honest Fox, neither am I." The lynx rubbed her eyes, squeezing them shut in thought. "It's just...you don't keep things like what we saw at Yohan secret, _while_ you're secretly betraying the Cornerian government, unless something very strange is going on. Right? Those bodies, what reason would there be to keeping them under wraps from everyone else, to the point where you're lying to Cornerian Navy about their existence?"

Fox listened as she spoke, her voice shaking a little. There was a thought that was forming in his mind, but which was far too exotic and frightening to suggest. But the more he thought of it, the less any other idea made sense.

_'But they can't be doing that,' _he thought to himself, shaking his head and trying to clear the idea from his mind. _'That...they can't. It's not possible. Even for Bauker, even with access to all of Andross'...experiments.'_

"So if the Lieutenant _wasn't _lying," Miyu began again. "And Alai really did die on Macbeth, then on Yohan-"

"It...it doesn't matter," Fox said quickly, cutting her off. "It doesn't change anything right now, and I'd rather not have to think about what may or may not be happening back there. There's too much happening right now as it is."

He started walking towards the door, his head a cloud of thoughts, buzzing with possibilities and theories. Trying to shove the mess into mental closet for later was like trying to contain a swarm of insects with a net with a hole in it. Just when he thought he had them all under control, one would escape, and send his mind cascading towards a realization he didn't want to admit. There was just too much _wrong _with it.

When he reached the door, he turned back to the lynx, who was only just beginning to follow him.

Fox took a deep breath. "Listen, we can sit down and figure it all out after we deal with Wilkins. But we don't need to worry about this, and neither does Sophie. Got it?"

Miyu nodded. "Got it," she said as she reached the threshold.

They stared at each other for a moment, as if confirming the sentiment to each other, before the pair left the lounge behind, wishing they could leave their conclusions there too.

* * *

"Hey Slip, what're you still doing up, man?" Falco asked as he strode down the darkened hall of the _Great Fox_, rubbing a towel over the last remnants of a late night shower. The light from the toad's room spilled out into the hallway, calling the avian towards it in curiosity.

When he got no answer, he hummed a questioning note and approached the door frame, pausing at the threshold. He peered inside, unsure of what to expect, but with a pretty good idea of what the toad might be up to.

"I knew it," Falco said quietly, laughing to himself. He watched the tiny mechanic at his workbench, stripping and connecting wires with mechanical determination. The toad's eyes were almost shut, but his fingers moved with precision, barely pausing as they went about their work. Based on the relatively small amount of spare bits and parts lying about the counter top, Falco guessed he was almost done with the project he was working on.

_'It's almost like he's sleepwalking,'_ the avian thought, smirking but unwilling to interrupt the mechanic's progress. _'Except he's sleep...wiring. Sleep soldering.' _He quickly got bored though, letting out a small yawn as he felt his bed calling him.

"G'night Slip," he said, shaking his head. He slapped the door frame once and continued on his way back to his quarters, not even noticing that Slippy hadn't replied.

* * *

The next morning found the Star Fox team continuing their preparations for the mission against Major Wilkins.

Bill stopped and stared, planting the butt of his paint roller into the deck and watching Katt's shuttle glide through the _Lone Wolf_'s hanger.

The small freighter's maneuvering jets flickered on and off in rapid succession, correcting the ship's course as the pilot carefully guided it around the exterior of the _Great Fox_. It had emerged from the mercenary ship's primary bay a few moments ago, and if Bill remembered the briefing correctly, would be headed towards the auxiliary hanger at the ship's stern. Its engines glowed at minimum capacity, and for a moment, Bill was stuck at the recursive scenario he was witnessing. Katt's freighter, flying around the _Great Fox_, all within the _Lone Wolf_'s hanger.

_'Just one of the hangers, actually,' _Bill corrected himself in amazement. _'I still can't believe how big this ship-'_

His thoughts escaped him as another paint roller poked him in the side, smearing his already blackened overalls with dark, colorless paint.

"Hey, no slacking," Sophie said with mock consternation, meeting his eyes with a withering glare. After a pause she poked his stomach twice more for effect, leaving small black splotches. "Get back to work."

Bill rolled his eyes and laughed, hefting his roller and stepping towards the paint bucket. "Yes ma'am. Getting back to work, ma'am."

"Oh don't you _ma'am _me, William," she retorted, arching her back to push her roller against the hull of the _Great Fox _above her. A few excess drops of paint dripped black onto her overalls and exposed fur, but the coat otherwise went on smooth. Half the belly of the ship was painted already, showing the progress they had made. "I know what you were doing there. With your _mind_."

"Oh? And what would that be, babe?" Now with a fresh supply of paint, Bill moved closer to Sophie and began applying it alongside her.

"Oogling."

"Oogling?"

"Oogling."

Bill stopped and looked at her, unsure if she was being serious or not. "Well the freighter's got nice curves, sure, but I-"

"Oh, right, the _freighter," _Sophie intoned. "Not the _voluptuous_ pink kitten at the stick of the thing." Neither realized that it was actually Miyu who was doing the piloting, Katt's mechanical expertise putting her to use elsewhere.

The hound quietly took another step towards his fiance and began painting again, lowering his voice a little. "Sophie, you don't honestly think that I would-"

"Oh how couldn't you?" she said, not taking her eyes off her task, though the pressure on her roller's shaft seem to increase all of a sudden. "Between her, that lithe little lynx that joined Fox's crew, and the ever so loyal Rhena, 'Ms. Exotica' Haggerty at your beck and call, where could I possibly...mm."

Bill's roller gently clattered to the ground as he softly embraced Sophie from behind, settling his chin on her shoulder. Their cheeks brushed, causing the chestnut canine to halt her accusation mid sentence.

"Sophia Arkanian," he said, just above a whisper. "I assure you that at no time during my daring, dangerous run from the law did I once, _ever_ lay eyes on a girl as beautiful, as intelligent, as-"

"Understanding," she hummed, stroking his face with one hand and holding his arms around her abdomen with the other. Her roller fell besides his on the deck of the _Lone Wolf._

"_Understanding_," he quickly added with a smirk. "As graceful, as caring-"

"Willing to put up with the fact that I barely ever got to see you..."

Bill nodded, tightening his grip around her stomach. "All of that, as you."

Her face brightened a little, and she leaned her head the opposite way so she could turn it and look back at her fiance. "You mean it?"

"I do," Bill said, locking with her eyes. A moment passed, and suddenly the rest of the world was melting away, leaving them standing alone beneath a spotlight of their unjealous love. It had seemed like so long, even after they had arrived back with the mercenaries on the _Lone Wolf, _that they had found time to simply hold each other. To enjoy the sense of safety created by two hearts beating so close to each other. And at that moment, all seemed quiet. All was right.

"...Except that one time we took a detour to Sumptuous Sands on Aquas during nude hour. _That _was something-"

"You!" she cried with a laugh, reaching behind him and finding the spot on his side where the tough denim of the overalls didn't cover.

Her subsequent tickling sent them both sprawling to the floor amidst laughs and shrieks of protest, wriggling against each other and the deck as each struggled to gain the upper hand in their mirthful assault.

* * *

"Ugh," Falco grunted as he hefted a crate, feeling the components shifting around inside. "It's like a goddamn romantic holovid."

Jason huffed from his seat atop one of the crates on the edge of the pile of supplies that had been dumped off by some of Wolf's men during the night. Elbows on his knees, he watched the playful couple roll on the ground for a few more moments before turning his attention back to Falco. They were a good fifty meters from the frolicking painters, leaving them safely out of earshot, even as the avian dropped his load on the _Lone Wolf_'s deck.

"I'm sensin' a little bit of bitterness there, my avionic friend."

Falco sniffed, reaching up and grabbing for the hook dangling from high above. Attached to a pulley, the rope stretched up to the _Great Fox_'s main thruster array, where a crew of Wolf's mechanics were busy at work within one of the actual engine cones. They were fixing the thruster which was damaged during the mercenaries' flight from the Cornerian Seventh Fleet, under the supervision of a testy Katt Monroe. Her voice could be heard occasionally eminating from within the cone, crying out as some hapless mechanic made one mistake or another.

"Not bitterness," Falco corrected, looping the hook through the crate's built-in harness and giving it a quick tug. The rope became taut, and the box slowly began its journey upward. "Just experience. You shouldn't be that _blindly_ happy like that. It ain't healthy."

Jason's huff became a chuckle as he jumped down from his seat. "News to me. I didn't realize it was unhealthy to laugh and play every once in a little while." He bent down and hefted the box he was sitting on, having a deal more difficulty than Falco did a moment ago with his. Passing the avian, he began waddling towards the point a few unhindered strides away where the rope would lower again.

"Not saying it is. I'm just saying that _that..." _Falco hopped up on the next crate to be lifted, taking a seat in a mirror of Jason before. He pointed at Bill, who was stooping to help Sophie to her feet as their giggles, still audible, began fading. "_That..._isn't what relationships are about."

"No?" Jason asked, setting his crate down with a sigh of exhaustion.

"No," Falco explained. "Take Katt and I for example."

"Broken up."

"We...no," he stuttered and quickly recovered. "Well yes. But that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that we lasted so long together because we were willing to fight each other when we needed to. Sure, it was more often than not, but it was how we worked. It was honest. _That _right there, is not honest. That's kiddy stuff."

Jason shrugged, hiding his own thoughts on the matter behind the desire to not start an argument. "Hey, to each his and her own, right?"

"I guess..." Falco trailed off, noticing the hook descending again for Jason's crate. "Just annoys me is all."

Jason knew what the blue-hued avian was getting at, even if the bird's machismo didn't allow him to say it aloud. Falco was jealous. Jason couldn't blame him; the grey fox had had plenty of similar thoughts pop into his head since the happy couple had returned. The way they laughed and reacted to each other so blithely, so naturally, it was impossible not to gain a sense of 'why not me', at least for a little while. It was the classic definition of melancholy, and it was just as common in the age of space and technology as it was in ages past, when poets lay that very feeling on paper.

It was the eternal blessing and curse of singles everywhere, he had long ago realized: the sense of freedom in being by yourself was like flying free of gravity. Jason felt it was something everyone should take time to experience and appreciate. But at the same time, they were all creatures of society, born and raised with the innate comfort caused by the closeness of another. And as one who had never felt that closeness, one could argue that Jason felt the need of it more than anyone.

_'Flying's nice_,' he thought to himself as he hooked his crate up to the dangling rope, _'But there's certainly something to be said about letting gravity do its job. When it gets stormy, its gotta be nice to know you've got an anchor holding you to port.'_

Jason stood upright as the box was hoisted away, taking a moment to gather his breath and observe the pair of canines a little more. They had finally begun painting again, though the way they glanced at each other could only be described as mischievous.

The fox was happy for them. Honestly he was. But at the same time, there was the ever present jealousy. Ever since Sophie had rejected his advances back in the academy, he had kept a lid on it, refusing to show anyone his inner sadness. Whenever someone asked about her, such as Falco back on Shoana, he gave the bogus story about not being interested. Not every romantic story turns out happy, he had quickly discovered; not every crush gets played out. In fact, most don't, killed in the crib by one party or another.

He sighed, wiping his brow and walking back to the pile of crates. A small, sad smile tugged at his lips, whisked away as he wiped his mouth to hide it from Falco.

_'One day, Jason old boy,' _he thought to himself. _'You'll find someone one day.'_

* * *

The female wolf cried out, a shout of primal fury that resounded through the room.

Caught off guard by the yelp, Aush flinched, his guard stuttering for just a moment. But that was all Rhena needed. She charged forward on fast feet, closing the few meters between them in the blink of an eye. Throwing a wild haymaker with her right arm, she allowed herself to be barely blocked by her canine opponent, refocusing her attention on his unguarded abdomen.

She threw a low jab with her left hand, feeling his abdominal muscles give through the tape bound around her paw. He doubled over, still shaken by the suddenness of her assault. Before he could correct the mistake caused by his body's reflex, she brought her knee up, narrowly missing his exposed muzzle and striking his forehead cleanly with an almost audible _crack_.

Aush staggered backward, dazed and confused. The few moments Rhena needed to regain her posture was enough to clear the stars in his eyes though, and as she strode forward, he had enough wits to put his fists up.

She hesitated as she moved into range, inviting a punch from Wolf's soldier and smoothly deflecting it as it came. The lupine countered with a jab, getting parried herself but bending backward as she did, shifting her center of gravity and bringing her right, taped foot up in a vicious kick to her opponent's side.

Even as he was reacting, shying away from the strike, she reversed her kick, lowering to a crouch and spinning the opposite way. With momentum gained, the back of her foot scythed around, cutting Aush's legs out from under him and sending him sprawling to the mat. He struck with a yelp, air rushing from his lungs and leaving him gasping.

Rhena rose quickly to her feet, standing out of range of any flailing but close enough to deliver another blow if needed.

However, it wasn't to be necessary. Aush lifted a hand in surrender, holding his side with his other as coughs racked the canine's body.

Rhena towered overhead from his point of view, staring down at him with eyes that seemed almost disappointed. Seeing his signal though, she dropped her guard and slackened her posture, breathing out slowly. She glared down at him. Where others would offer their hand to haul their fallen sparing partner up, Rhena instead huffed and turned away, making her way back to the bench and leaving Wolf's soldier to struggle to his feet on his own, still clutching his side.

Little was said by the other occupants of the sparring room, though some of Wolf's men who had dropped by to watch the fight made quiet noises of both amazement at Rhena's fighting skills, and condemnation at her lack of sportsmanship.

"Nice fight," Fox complimented as she sat on the bench next to him. He began wrapping his hands with the protective sparring tape used by the fighters on the _Lone Wolf_. "Could've helped him up though."

Rhena shrugged and began unwrapping her own tape. "He's the enemy," she said simply, as if it explained everything. "The pain he feels getting up will help him learn for next time."

They looked at each other for a moment before Fox looked away, shaking his head at her callousness. _'I'm glad though; at least she's on _my _side.' _"Well, nicely done regardless."

Rhena nodded in thanks, balling the unwrapped tape from one hand and tossing it in a receptacle nearby. She brushed some sweat-matted, fiery red hair from her eyes. "They've got good basics, but they're sloppy on counters," she said as Fox flexed his fingers, feeling the tape bite into his knuckles the way it was supposed to when it was applied tight. "It's a training problem. I could tell by how automatically he did what he did."

Fox nodded. "Good to know." He stood, swinging his arms back and forth to loosen up as he approached the sparring mat, reflecting on Rhena's fighting knowledge. _'Really glad_.'

Unlike his teammate, Fox had taken Alecks Crendon's advice and worn a tight shirt and athletic shorts, both in matching shades of black and orange. Rhena, without any alternative, had instead worn her frayed, well used flightsuit, having fashioned it into a forest green athletic top and something approaching gym shorts.

The vulpine approached the center of the mat, taking his place at one side of the circle while his opponent did the same. Rhade, like the rest of soldiers gathered in the sparring room, was dressed in the shirt and shorts with the omnipresent red and black color scheme. He regarded Fox with a watchful eye, a glance that wasn't overly hostile or indicative of the fight to come, but rather more curious, as if he were observing a species he had never seen before.

A buzzer rang out, and the rest of the room fell quiet as those present turned from their conversations or other distractions to watch the fight begin.

The two combatants approached each other in the center of the ring. Fox raised his hands in a standard boxing pose, rising to the balls of his feet and leading with his left side. Rhade, on the other hand, took a more centered approach, favoring neither side and settling into a stable stance.

Fox sized the situation up immediately. Rhade was only slightly taller, but more physically built; he would be taking the endurance approach. The vulpine, on the other hand, was more lightly built, and would have to depend on speed and agility to see him through the fight.

Fox began bouncing a little on his toes, drifting one way, then the other as he tried to provoke an attack from the more powerful wolf. Rhade watched him, turning to keep the circling mercenary in the center of his vision. The wolf's muscles tensed and relaxed several times as he thought he saw opportunities to strike, but at the last moment decided against it.

Finally, Rhade saw an opening he could exploit and lashed out, closing the small reach between them with his fist aimed at Fox's jaw. Fox ducked, slipping beneath the hook and countering with a gut shot, but he was forced to shy away from the follow up by Rhade, robbing his counter of any strength. He sprang backwards out of the fray, getting tagged with a glancing blow to his cheek as he did.

Regaining his stance, Fox began circling again, this time searching for a weakness instead of trying to draw Rhade into an over-extension. The wolf followed him, his deliberate plodding almost lulling the mercenary into the sense that he was too slow to land a hit, something Fox realized would have been a critical error.

Spotting an avenue as Rhade took another step towards him, Fox bobbed forward and got off a quick one-two combo on the wolf's face. He was too slow on the exodus though, and Rhade managed to land a solid punch that broke through Fox's guard and left a bruise on his muzzle.

Fox stumbled away, gaining a safe distance and shaking his head clear. Rhade didn't let up, shrugging off his own hits and pursuing.

Fox blocked one punch with his arm, ducking around another and planting his elbow in Rhade's gut. The wolf let out a grunt but swung again, hitting open air as Fox continued to dance around him.

With a frustrated growl, Rhade broke from his tactics and drove forward, suffering a hit to the jaw but throwing Fox to the mat with his shoulder. They fell with a muted _thud_, air rushing from Fox's lungs as his mind started shouting at him. Pinned to the ground, his speed advantage was useless; if he didn't get back on his feet, Rhade's powerful fists would finish him without hesitation.

Straddling the fox, Rhade tried not to give him the opportunity. Fox tried to wriggle away from point blank blows to his face, but weathered several before, with a cry of exertion, throwing his legs up and knocking Rhade from his perch. He rolled away, gaining his feet with less grace than he would've liked, and faced the wolf again.

Their fight continued for a little while more, Fox mostly succeeding in dodging Rhade's attacks, and Rhade handling Fox's machinegun strikes with little damage. They began to take their toll on each other though: Rhade's muzzle and cheeks were bleeding in a few places, and Fox fared no better under the occasional sledgehammer of a punch that he couldn't avoid. Both were tired, though Rhade easily kept his feet, his slow and steady approach allowing him to conserve energy. Fox swayed a little, his legs starting to feel more and more like lead. He never lost his feet again, but it didn't seem like it would stay that way for long.

Rhade approached again, and Fox lashed out with a kick, catching the wolf's knee as he stepped and buckling his leg. Twisting, the vulpine caught Rhade's muzzle again with his elbow, dazing the wolf and sending him to the mat. However, as worn down as the mercenary was, he had lost some of his speed, and Rhade was able to grab Fox's arm on the way, dragging them both down.

Fox tried to tuck a shoulder and roll over the wolf, but his elbow was in a vice grip, and he landed flat on his back. Rhade managed to gain his senses quicker, and scrambled to his knees, planting one on the vulpine's chest and lifting a fist.

"Ey'," Fox sputtered, finding his lungs empty of air. He raised an open hand. "I give! I give."

Rhade relaxed, lowering his fist and slowly rising to his feet while Fox lay on the mat, panting. Adjusting his stance, Rhade offered a hand to the fallen vulpine, hauling the mercenary to his feet. Fox stood there for a moment, catching his breath and feeling the pain of a thousand minor wounds begin to trickle into his nervous system, taking the place of the draining adreneline.

They walked back to the bench where Rhena sat, watching them with interest as they made their way over. Fox was arguably the more damaged of the two, though the last shot he scored on Rhade's knee caused Wolf's pilot to walk with a visible limp. With heavy sighs of exertion they fell to the bench on either side of the female wolf, and began the process of unwinding the bloodied, torn sparing tape from their respective limbs.

All three of them were quiet for a few moments as another pair of fighters took their place at the ring and began their scrimmage. The sounds of body blows and the scrape of tape being unstuck filled the air, until Rhena eventually broke the silence.

"Not bad for fighter jockies," she said simply, keeping her eyes on the fight going on.

Fox laughed a weary chuckle, balling the tape from one arm and tossing it in the trash. He grabbed a fresh towel from the stand behind the bench, dabbing it red with the blood from the cuts on his face.

"Not bad for a coupla wolves," he countered, leaning forward so he could glance at both of them at once. "Slow and steady wins the day today." He took a swig from his water bottle.

They looked back, an expression of slightly confused insult from Rhade, and a snort of acknowledgment from Rhena. The female lupine had had time to get used to Fox's occasionally dry sense of humor, and while she tended not to enjoy it as much as Falco or Bill, she understood it. Rhade, however, didn't.

Fox leaned over Rhena a little towards Rhade and lowered his voice. "Here's where you say, 'not bad for a couple of mercenaries.'"

"It wasn't," Rhade admitted, wiping his mouth with his own towel. "About what I expected from you, actually."

"What you _expected_?" Fox asked. He paused a moment. Maybe this was how someone like Rhade gave out compliments. "So how did I fare?"

"Quick," the wolf said. "You weren't an easy target. But you could benefit from stamina. All that running around, that circling; I'm surprised you fought as long as you did. But you did it well." He began working on the tape on his feet. "Well enough that I could fly for you, in any case."

Fox stopped. It suddenly dawned on him that when Rhade had asked him to spar after the briefing the day before, the wolf was really asking him to prove himself worthy of loyalty. Considering the way Wolf had described his organization though, he should have probably seen such a challenge coming. If a command hierarchy, which Fox took Wolf's 'Alpha, Beta, Gamma' structure to be, was based on ability in a given field, it'd only make sense that before a pilot submitted to an authority, he'd want some proof that it was deserved.

"If you wanted to test me, we could have used sims you know," Fox commented, referring to the flight simulators he was sure a ship like the _Lone Wolf _was outfitted with. "Would've made more sense considering what I'll be commanding you to do."

"No," Rhade replied, shaking his head. He balled the used tape up and threw it away. "There's no sense of urgency in simulators. In the back of your head, you know it's all fake. But _this." _He swept a hand out, gesturing towards the two soldiers fighting. One of them got hit particularly hard, sending him sprawling to the mat. "This is authentic. You flinch. You bleed, and feel pain. If you want the true test of a man's fighting ability, of the soldier himself, regardless of discipline, you go back to the very first way we fought war."

Fox nodded in understanding, digesting the words the wolf offered him. Rhade stood up after another moment, glancing towards the fight that was beginning to wrap up in the ring.

"I'll be watching you, Mr. McCloud," he said cryptically, turning towards Fox. "But I'm glad we were able to fight today; it's given me some piece of mind about our chances for success on our first mission. I'll be around if you need me."

And with that, after nodding at Rhena, he turned again and made his way towards the entrance of the room. The mercenaries watched him go, his stride that of a proud soldier, despite his recent limp. The sounds of the fight continued on, but from the din, Fox barely caught Rhena's words, just the Beta disappeared out the door.

"Rhade's a good man," she stated, her gaze lingering before looking back at Fox.

He raised an eyebrow and smirked a little, not sure how to take what she had said. For an instant, they sounded almost like words of pining, but Fox quickly shook those thoughts clear from his mind. Trying to imagine Rhena actually having _affection _for someone was like trying to imagine Falco having tact around someone. Seeing her face when she turned towards him only confirmed it.

Rhena's expression wasn't the smitten happiness of Sophie whenever she was around Bill, as Fox had come to notice in the Cornerian medic very quickly. Nor was it the flirtatious scheming of Katt whenever she was around Wolf's soldiers, or sometimes one of the male members of Star Fox whenever Falco was around to scoff. It wasn't even the slightly distanced, schoolyard crush he had begun to see in Linka for Slippy before she fell into the coma.

It was respect. The way the fiery haired wolf looked at Rhade as he walked away was the same way she looked at Bill, or even, to a limited extent, Fox himself in recent weeks. But it had taken over a month for the vulpine to rise to that half-platform in her eyes. Rhade had done it fully in one session of sparing and a summary of his outlook on life.

"Yeah," Fox said, standing as he did so and drawing a deep breath. "Well, maybe if you ask nicely he'll let you spar him next time."

Rhena stood with him and they began making their way towards the door as well, headed for the _Great Fox. _"I think I'd enjoy a fight with him," she said thoughtfully as they crossed the threshold into the hallway beyond. They joined the sparse traffic walking both ways. Rhena added, almost as an afterthought, "Or you, for that matter."

Fox barked a laugh, taking the compliment with a smile. "Only if you promise to help me up after I make friends with the mat."

"Maybe," Rhena said, and Fox thought he could detect a hint of mirth in her voice, though its presence was so rare that he could have just been hearing things. "We'll see if you deserve it, first."

* * *

A/N:

So, I can't believe I forgot to mention this last time, we've reached 10,000 views! As of typing this right now, we're at 10,667. And I want to thank you, everyone who has contributed to that number. Seriously. I owe you guys quite a bit of gratitude, so if anyone thinks of a way I could repay you as the audience, let me know in a review or PM. If its feasible (and preferably story-related), I'll do it.

Alrighty, on to the reviews:

**RedBay**: Thank you RedBay; to hear that I'm improving means way more to me than anything else, especially coming from you. Now, to the meat of your reviews...

Your analysis of Siona is spot on what I was going for; especially after Basser, I knew that I'd have to try a bit harder to make a good 'informant' type character. Luckily, I was planning for Siona to be this way since the beginning (yes, the _beginning_, all those years ago), so I guess the one-off Basser gave me a chance to practice that characterization before hitting a lasting side character.

Linka and Slippy's relationship is something I'm having a lot of fun playing around with, so I'm glad its turning out at least somewhere intriguing. We'll see where it ends up. And as regards Rhena and Sophie, I was actually planning the opposite of what you said, which should hopefully show in this chapter. That is, Rhena is the 'clueless' one, and Sophie picks up on an imagined (well, three of them, actually) affair. As I intended Rhena's characterization to show during the fic (whether or not I succeeded is another matter entirely, haha), she tends to be far too abrasive and conflict-minded to find the idea of a relationship worth pursuing. She follows Bill for other reasons, which I'll get into as the chapters progress and I'm in need of more character exposition to explore.

Thanks again for the review, my friend.

**chaos Leader**: I supposed it would've been more practical to split the chapter up, eh? Thanks for the review cL! I'll keep the length issue in mind as I go forward.

**The Frustrated**: Hopefully it didn't mess with your sleep schedule too much :) And its truly my pleasure; as I've said before, this hobbie brings me no end of entertainment, and you guys make it all the more worth pursuing. One of these days I'll get around to original writing, and I'll have people like you, and cL, and RedBay, and all of my reviewers to thank for keeping me going.

As always, thank you for reading, and please leave a review if you feel like saying anything. All comments and critiques are greatly appreciated, no matter how short or long.

-Irish Redd


	32. Chapter 32: The Good Major Pt I

**XXXII**: The Good Major Pt I

* * *

"Major Wilkins, I apologized for the delay," Siona said with a professional smile, striding into the small office behind its three occupants. "Business called me elsewhere before I received your message."

The Major stood and turned as the Warlord entered, shaking her hand when she approached and offering a curt smile. He watched her circle behind the desk, placing a folder of carbon files on the surface before taking her seat. At that point, he turned to the pair of guards standing directly behind his chair and nodded. The uniformed soldiers received the message and backed off, taking up positions in the corners of the office, giving the two felines a respectful distance.

"Understandable," the Major said, taking his seat. "'The nature of business,' and all that." He paused, staring at Siona for a moment before twisting his lips in an expression of curiosity. He lifted a hand towards the men behind him. "You don't object to my guards?"

Siona waved the notion away. "Not at all, Major. Your comfort is my pleasure."

Wilkins smiled and nodded, accepting the gesture of hospitality. At the same time, he was well aware that Waypoint Station was, in fact, Siona's station, and that the information broker had nothing to fear within her own proverbial walls. The gesture of respect was at the same time a subtle threat, as the Major knew that any attempt to extort or threaten the Warlord would result in a station full of armed guards pounding on the office door. The Major decided he liked Warlord Siona; the fact that she didn't need the physical presence of her own guard projected a confidence and ability to read the actions of others that he respected.

The Major was dressed in a uniform befitting his rank, complete with campaign ribbons and battle medals from his service with the Cornerian Seventh Fleet. Despite his 'transfer' of employment to Warlord Bauker, he had pressed hard to be able to keep his uniform greens. While the majority of his fellow military regulars would probably have disagreed with his course in life, and would probably shoot him on sight if they knew what he had done, he knew what he was doing was for the betterment of Corneria, and Lylat as a whole. And in his heart, he took great pride in the fact that he was working for the future of his home world.

Major Wilkins shifted in his seat, clearing his throat after a short period of silence. "Well, if you don't mind Ms. Siona, I'd like to get to business. The delay in this meeting is, as I've said, understandable, but it's left me a fair bit behind schedule."

"Of course," she replied, leaning forward and steepling her fingers. "I'll admit that I'm intrigued by the reason behind this meeting. If you're here, you want information or materials, and you want them secretly. Otherwise you'd have sent a message."

The Major nodded. No matter how secure a com line supposedly was, it was never guaranteed that there wasn't a hacker listening in on any given conversation. "Very good. But secrecy is only a byproduct of why I'm here." He paused, letting his sight drop a little, as if gathering his thoughts. "My purpose here is for emphasis."

"Emphasis?" Siona repeated, giving a little smile. "_Emphasis_. I think that's a new one for me."

"Warlord Bauker believes you aren't taking his requests for information seriously," the Major explained. His tone was light and nonthreatening, though it was easy to understand how much weight his words carried.

"Well as I recall, our deal was completed to satisfaction for both parties," Siona replied.

"The information you gave us was useless," Wilkins countered, his tone rising slightly. "Peppy Hare's family, his military record, his favorite restaurants. Useless junk our spies could have picked up in half a day's work."

"Major Wilkins." Siona sighed, removing her glasses with one hand and propping her face up with the same. "My deal with your Warlord was a database dump of all of my information on Peppy. You got that. I don't know what else you want to hear-"

"The truth," Wilkins cut her off. "We know you have more information. His history with the Angels, covert operations, personal files..."

Siona sat back as Wilkins listed off the types of information he was looking for. She let her hands fall in her lap, pulling a soft cloth from her pocket and casually wiping the lenses of her glasses as the Major continued.

"So I take it the interrogations aren't going so well then," she said once he finished, keeping her eyes on her glasses.

The Major stared at her for a moment, his lips twitching before being pressed into a thin line. He mentally cursed at himself at the involuntary reaction of his facial muscles. He should have expected Siona to know what was happening to Peppy, given her infamous network of eyes and ears throughout Lylat.

"...No," he finally said, relenting to the fact that she probably knew as much as he himself did about Bauker's efforts to extract a certain, valuable bit of data from the hare's mind. "He's resisted our more..._extreme _efforts to a surprising degree."

"Have you tried subjecting him to Project Afterlife?" Siona continued, waggling her fingers when saying the title of Bauker's project. She shivered a little, though the Major suspected it was more for effect than any actual emotion. "Truthfully, I don't know whether to congratulate your engineering team for their accomplishment, or give their names to Cornerian High Command for crimes against the citizens of Lylat. Well, former citizens anyway."

"We're getting away from the subject at hand," the Major quickly said, tapping a finger on the desktop for effect. "We need that information. And we know you have it."

Siona looked at him. Her gaze wasn't confrontational, egging the leopard into some sort of reaction. Nor was it demeaning, or in any way a bid for position. She was merely observing the Major, watching his reaction as the moments of silence stretched on. To his credit, Bauker's subordinate reacted in much the same manner, returning her stare to an equally neutral degree. Like two snipers watching each other through their scopes, but neither having remembered their ammunition.

"Very well," Siona said, reaching over to the pile of carbon datasheets she had set down on her desk. They were contained within a sturdy folder, held shut with a string. "In this file set is all of the pertinent information regarding Peppy Hare and his involvement with the Cornerian Angels." She put a hand on the folder. "Given the nature of the information, the price will be significantly higher, but I _am _willing to sell it."

The Major said nothing for a few moments. In the back of his head, he had wondered why Siona had brought the files with her to the meeting; he had reasoned that they may have been left over from a previous conference she had, and she had been unable to properly store them before meeting with him. It had seemed like a logical conclusion, but the question had nagged at him during the entirety of the conversation.

Now, knowing that the files supposedly contained the very information he had come to seek from her, he was suddenly struck dumb. Had she been able to predict exactly what he was looking for? Had she somehow traced the attempts Bauker's hackers had made on her database? The files in the folder now being pushed his way were hard copies; there was no electronic storage device which could be remotely altered to display the information needed. She had probably predicted the purpose of their meeting the moment she had received his first message.

The Major's initial fondness of the women behind the desk was fading into a wary, adversarial respect. If she had been keen enough to read his actions ahead of time, what had she been able to coax out of him during the conversation without him knowing? He had the sudden urge to leave the meeting saying as little more as possible.

"How do I know the information I need is in that folder?" Wilkins asked, choosing his words carefully.

"You may check it right now, if you like," Siona offered, opening the folder for him and twisting her palm towards the ceiling, as if showing her cooperative intentions.

The folder was stuffed with documents. Pictures, graphs, timelines; a virtual treasure trove of information. Wilkins glanced down at the first page that caught the light of the office. A portrait of Peppy Hare occupied the top left corner of the document, with the rest of the page featuring line after line of personal information and physical characteristics.

The Major waved away the notion of checking through the entire folder for the right information. The consequences of lying about what information it contained were dramatic enough that he knew Siona wouldn't take the risk. The information he wanted was almost certainly inside the folder. His only question was why she had chosen to print it all out on carbon paper. Finding the information would take a good deal of tedious reading and sorting without any of the search functions built into electronic documents.

"I'll trust that everything's as it should be," he said with a curt smile. Reaching forward, he closed the folder and stood up, taking it and tucking it under his arm. "You'll have your payment before I leave the station."

"No negotiation on cost?" she asked, looking up at him and raising an eyebrow.

"I'm sure your asking price is fair," he replied, hoping his vague answer would throw her off a little. The way she was watching him, with eyes trained to gather information from the most innocuous of sources, was certainly doing the same to him. It was to no avail, however; she merely smiled with understanding.

Behind him, one of his guards punched the keypad by the office door, opening it with a _swish _and allowing the busy noises of Waypoint Station outside to drift in.

Warlord Siona had an inward smile to match the one on her lips as the Major and she exchanged the standard, formal goodbyes. She stood and watched the leopard and his guards depart the office, waiting until the door closed behind them to sit back down at her desk. She pulled out a slip of paper and a pen, and began writing what would look like gibberish to anyone who would read it. It was a personal form of cryptography, a code she had trained herself to write her notes in to ensure they would remain useless to anyone but her if they happened to get lost somewhere.

Like most face-to-face meetings, her time with Major Wilkins had yielded a good deal of information, almost an equal trade for the information she had given up to him.

"Peppy Hare under interrogation," she whispered to herself as she jotted down her notes. The remark she had made during the conversation had been made purely on a hunch. Until the Major's answer, she had no conclusive proof of what was happening to Peppy in Bauker's custody. Or for that matter, that he was in Bauker's custody at all. She continued, remembering his quick change of topic when she brought up Bauker's Project Afterlife. "Most likely a subject of Project Afterlife."

She paused, looking up for a moment to recall any other useful bits of information she could glean. With a smile, she penned a final sentence, remembering the finality with which the Major spoke.

"Bauker desperate for information."

* * *

"Alright down there; the _Courier's _launched and _we're_ disengaging from Waypoint. Stand by."

"Roger Slip," Fox's tinny voice sounded through the bridge speakers of the _Great Fox_. "Did Siona's man get the beacon in place?"

"Looks like it," Slippy replied, his voice automatically keying the bridge mike's activation. "I'll send your Arwing my sensor feed."

"Can I get that too, Slip?" Miyu asked, her gold-bordered portrait indicating the private channel and request.

"Yep."

"Read my mind, Slip," Fox's voice smiled. "Keep 'er at a safe distance and don't get too comfortable. Just because that ship's not big enough to hold minions doesn't mean its alone out here."

"Got it Fox. But, isn't that what you're down there for?"

"We're not out of the soup of Sector Y quite yet; the Arwings' shields will survive for a bit but not long enough to make more than a pass at this point at any interlopers. Rhade's mount'll be disabled by then, and the CDF's will be long gone. I-"

"Hey!"

"Sorry Billy, but Fox's right. I feel like if I accidentally stepped on one of those spindly shells I'd crack it in two."

"They'll fly circles around you, bird."

"Ain't saying much; good Mother Evolution took that gift from me a long-"

"Can it, Falco."

"Or wait, did you mean my Arwing?"

"I said _can it _Falco."

"Cuz' I'd be willing to take bets on-"

"Falco!"

"...She started it. And I heard that giggle, Miyu."

"I don't know _what _you're talking about."

"Is this what passes for preflight chatter, Mr. McCloud?"

"...Anyway Slip, consider us out of commission until we clear the radiation. Then we'll launch if, _when_, the Major puts up a fight."

"Got it," Slippy finished, turning off the microphone and activating the sensor feed to Fox's and Miyu's Arwings.

He sat at the pilot's chair on the bridge of the _Great Fox_, stubby hands on the control yoke. Carefully guiding the apparatus this way and that, he likewise carefully pointed the frigate sized ship through the misty yellow clouds of Sector Y, away from Warlord Siona's Waypoint Station, and along the course provided by the flashing beacon on his radar readout.

The bridge hummed quietly with the smooth vibrations of the _Great Fox_'s engines, more so than ever before. Slippy smiled, thinking of the final report from Katt of what Wolf's mechanics had done to the ship's heart. To call it a patch job would be a vast understatement; it was more like an overhaul. The repairs Katt and Miyu made to the actual engines in the belly of the ship were more akin to what he was used to, but with the thrust cones, conveyance lines, and all sorts of other components freshly installed and polished, it was almost like the _Great Fox_ was brand new.

"_Not that I know what that would feel like," _Slippy thought, allowing Major Wilkin's ship to get a far enough lead so as not to reveal the mercenaries' carrier through the radiation. _"Fox's dad had this ship long before I signed on. I wonder how long ago he bought-"_

"You should check the ship's logs," Linka said from the sensor station halfway across the bridge.

Slippy instinctively turned his head towards the new voice before realizing it who it belonged to. She sat with her bare feet up on the console of the station, reclining in the chair with her hands behind her head. The coyote was back in her Cornerian greens, frayed and torn just as Slippy remembered them. She was idly checking displays and readouts, tapping the screen and sighing in frustration as nothing happened, as if she forgot what she was.

"They go back to a day before the actual launch date, you know," she continued, glancing towards him. "Remember? You found that last time you were, er, _optimizing _the ship's memory. Couldn't figure out the password for day minus one though."

"Well the field was eighteen characters long," he said in frustration, forgetting himself momentarily. "Do y-you know how many possible permutations-"

"Five point eight one to the twenty fifth exponential power, if you only include Lylatian alphanumerics," Linka stated simply. She shrugged, returning to her idle toying with her console's keys. "You calculated it once."

"Well...," he trailed off, catching himself. He too had forgotten for the moment who she was. What she was.

Linka looked at him again, watching his long sighted stare. Her eyes narrowed a little, and she suddenly seemed concerned. "Slip, you're staring again. S'not very polite you know."

He shook his head, trying to regain his state of mind, but finding it difficult with the apparition around. It wasn't as bad as before; Slippy hated to admit it, but he was starting to get used to her sudden appearances. His eyes lingered again before he finally managed to tear them off her and back to the viewport in front of him.

"What?" she asked from out of his field of vision. "What's wrong? Do I look okay?"

"Does she look okay?" Jason asked, strolling onto the otherwise empty bridge.

Slippy jolted upright, nearly yanking the control yoke with him. He turned towards Jason, the vulpine making his way behind the toad towards the sensor station chair. "W-what?"

"I said, 'does she look okay'," Jason repeated, nodding his head towards the viewport and the yellow mists beyond. He plopped down in the now empty seat, putting his feet up on the console in an unwitting imitation of the chair's previous, nonexistent occupant. He was dressed in his usual, slightly outdated and out of place fashions, this time a white, long sleeve shirt and a black vest. "The _Great Fox_, the mission...your latest studio record; how's everything going?"

"Oh," Slippy stammered, turning back to his own console. "Everything's going, um, to plan, I guess. Fox and the pilots are down in the main hanger, ready to launch. Katt's watching over the engines down below, and Sophie's-"

"Bored out of her skull," the canine answered for herself from the bridge door, surprising them both with her quiet appearance. Slippy had noticed that she had brought a small rucksack on board when she showed up a few days ago with Bill and Rhena; it was probably a personal bag, which would explain where her casual v-neck shirt and cargo pants must have come from. She was leaning against the door frame with a weary smile on her face. "Are contracts always this slow?"

"Just wait a few minutes, Sophie," Jason answered with a smirk. "I know we've been camping out at Waypoint for awhile, but things tend to pick up unexpectedly with these guys."

She paused, her expression sharpening a little. "Alright, now I'm worried. Slippy, should I be worried?"

"No, no, definitely not," he stammered, shaking his head, though his eyes never left the viewport in front of him. He checked the radar again. "P-probably not."

"_Probably _not?"

Slippy tapped another button on his console. "Well, m-most...yeah, most likely not."

Sophie's jaw fell a little. "What is William going to be flying into?"

"_William_," Jason sniggered. "C'mon Sophie, you heard the briefing; we don't _know_ what the Major's going to do when we confront him. We do know that he's just in medium shuttle, which, if I remember my logistics courses correctly, shouldn't last more than few seconds against this old girl." He slapped the small lip of the console he sat at fondly. "Nothing different from half the sorties Billy's flown."

"Yeah," Sophie sulked a little, "And I worried during every one of those too."

Jason rolled his eyes and sighed. "Slip, you got anything to help soothe the poor maiden in waiting?"

"Hm?" Slippy intoned, turning and looking at them both in turn, quickly looking away from Sophie's expectant eyes. "Er, sure. L-look at this." He tapped a few keys, putting his radar display up on the main viewport, partially obscuring the gases of Sector Y outside.

Sophie stepped forward to get a better look at the display, entering the bridge itself. The radar's readout was entirely clear, save the _Great Fox _at the center of the display, and a single, blinking red dot towards the top of the display. Every once in awhile though, another tiny blip, or a series of blips would appear and quickly disappear in some random place on the image.

"That b-blinking dot at the top there is Major Wilkins' transport," Slippy explained. "If anything that size or bigger shows up, it'll show up on the radar here. So we'll know ahead of time if we have company coming in with corvettes or whatnot."

"And I figured we've got the snubfighter angle covered pretty damn well with everyone downstairs," Jason added, pointing towards the deck of the bridge. "As long as you have faith in Billy's flying abilities, that is."

"Of course I do," Sophie replied tiredly. She studied the radar image a little longer. Another one of the brief blips appeared and subsequently disappeared. "What're those?" she asked, pointing to where the little smudge had temporarily occupied.

Slippy didn't even have to look at her to see what she meant. "Radar ghosts, p-probably caused by the radiation in the cloud. Or maybe pockets of dense gas." He fidgeted a little. "We're running on low sensor power right now so that Wilkins doesn't pick up our signal, so the filter quality isn't all that great."

"Ah," Sophie hummed. Her expression lightened a little bit, but it was still evident on her face that she didn't like being separated from her fiance in a situation like the one they found themselves in. However, her doubts were reassured enough for her to let the matter drop, and another question of hers to come to the forefront. The black and chestnut canine watched the toad for a few moments, noticing something odd about him.

"Slippy, are you alright?" she finally asked, making her way to the last available console seat besides the captain's chair. It put her at Slippy's left, opposite Jason on his right. "You seem...fidgety." Jason laughed as Slippy cocked his head at the question, looking at her quizzically.

"Nah, nah," Jason answered for the toad, remembering that Sophie had only been around the toad a few days and hadn't had the opportunity to see his natural state. "He's just been in a funk the last coupla days. Er, no offense Slip. But you're looking back to your energetic, slightly overexcited ways, if you don't mind me saying." The way Jason said the words took any malice from them, even causing Slippy to smile a little bit as he waved away any hint that he was offended.

Before Sophie could reply though, Fox's tinny voice again resounded through the bridge.

"Looks like a pretty straight forward course to Aquas," he said, causing Slippy to spin his chair back towards the viewport and his displays. "Start recording all radio signals in the area once we get clear of the radiation. If he communicates with anyone, we need to know."

Slippy opened a scaled map of the immediate region around the _Great Fox_, encompassing the water planet Aquas at the top right corner and Waypoint Station at the bottom left. About halfway through, close to the edge of Sector Y, two blinking markers indicated the positions of the mercenary ship and Major Wilkins' transport.

Abruptly, the lead marker seemed to turn on dime, heading away at a right angle from its previous course. Instead of making for Aquas, the ship appeared to be headed deeper into Sector Y.

"Um...nevermind," Fox's apologetic voice came through as he too saw the change in course. "Stay on him Slip, but keep your eyes peeled. Something's goin' on here."

"Gotcha," Slippy replied, guiding the controls to the side and setting the _Great Fox _on an intercept course. "H-hey Jason, can you start up the comm recorder anyway? I've got a hunch."

"Sure," Jason answered, putting his feet down and sitting up, searching the console in front of him for the right controls. "Sure," he repeated, stretching the word until he found the right combination. "Yah. Done."

The _Great Fox _glided through the yellowish gases of the Sector, a black and red shadow blurred by endless expanses of vapor. Its engines glowed bright and brilliant, creating a noticeable wake behind it, though like the outline of the ship itself, the effects of the thrusters were muddied and dissipated quickly in the haze. Other than the marginal radar signature the ship gave off, it was invisible to all but the most sensitive of sensor systems.

Down below, in the main hanger, a half-dozen snubfighters sat at the ready, half powered up and occupied by vigilant pilots. At least, they were vigilant at the beginning of the mission. At this point, their attention was beginning to flag, and the amount of side conversation was beginning to increase. Arguments from Falco were quickly and succinctly rebutted by Rhena and Miyu, while Bill and Rhade started a side discussion about tactics during the Lylat War.

Amid the swirl of conversation sat Fox, hearing every back and forth but largely ignoring them. Instead, his eyes were focused on the sensor feed he was receiving from the _Great Fox's _bridge, flooding his Arwing's dash with information readouts and displays. He sorted through them with a practiced mind, analyzing the data and doing his best to silence the growing voice of worry that was whispering in his ear.

"Something's not right here," he said quietly to himself, watching a live feed from the bridge's viewport. The gases of the Sector were beginning to thin out. It wasn't noticeable at first, but it had been a few minutes, and by now he was sure; the vapors were becoming more clear, to the point that if he peered close enough, he thought he could make out the extremely faint outline of an engine glow off in the distance.

"Hey Slip," he said, causing the side conversations to die down. "See if you can back off a bit."

"I'm not s-sure I can," the toad's voice came back through the com, his portrait appearing as he spoke. "Unless I full stop, we'll be naked visually pretty soon. And we're at the edge of radar as it is. If we push radar strength, he'll detect us. And if we stop, he'll get out of range."

"Alright," Fox said, shaking his head a little. What choice did he have then? "Then get ready to engage. This might be as far as we can go undercover."

"R-roger."

"Listen up guys," he said, including the entire team on the conversation. "Good news is the radiation's going down. By the time the fireworks go off, we should be good to launch. Power up your ships, and keep an eye on your rad meter. Stay away from any pockets you come across."

"Got it, McCloud," Falco replied, setting off a chorus of acknowledgements from the rest of the team.

"Stick close to the _Great Fox_'s shields until we're needed anyway, just in case. I don't know where Wilkins' is heading, but we're out of options."

* * *

"Major, sir, we've reached the gate."

"Excellent. Thanks, ensign; take us in."

"Aye, sir."

Major Wilkins strode to stand behind the pilot's chair on the cramped bridge of his vessel. The room was reflective of the ship itself; small for a medium transport, but large for a ship of its size. A pair of officers sat at the crew stations, one with a com headset on, the other with both hands on the controls of the ship. Together with a pair of guards, the five of them made up the entire crew of the vessel.

About the size of a corvette, the transport had just enough hull space for a bridge and a few personal rooms, making it ideal for long range courier assignments and other mundane missions. What little space was left over after the essentials were taken care of, however, was crammed with modifications, giving hint to its less than mundane responsibilities. Engine improvements, reinforced shielding and an enhanced sensor system were only the beginning of the equipment hidden 'under the hood' of the transport.

For all the improvements and alterations made to the transport though, it lacked the one piece of relatively ancient technology that mattered to the Major at the moment. A document scanner. The information Siona had supplied him had indeed been worth the credits; he had read it with his own eyes. However, without a document scanner to digitize the carbon copies, he would be unable to send the information itself once he reached where the gate would take him. That would have to wait until he had docked with the rendezvous frigate. "_No matter," _he told himself, "_Bauker waited this long for the information; he can wait another few hours."_

"Ah, sir?" the comm officer questioned, catching the leopard's attention. "That radar ghost, the one that's been popping up occasionally since we left Waypoint?"

"Yes?" Wilkins acknowledged, turning towards the officer.

"Its not a ghost sir," the man reported, glancing at his screen. "I'm picking up power spikes several klicks back, consistent with military weapons and equipment."

"Could it be a rad burst? Those are getting less common the closer we get, I suppose."

"Its possible," the officer reasoned, "But these readings are too definite. Too artificial. In my opinion sir, we're being very delicately pursued."

Major Wilkins breathed out, pursing his lips. He thought for a few moments, weighing his possibilities and options before deciding on the best outcome.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "We're close enough to the gate. If they keep following us, the activation blast will take them out. Pour all power into engines and begin the preparations for gate travel."

"Aye sir."

* * *

"Transport's dropped its shields and is picking up speed."

Fox growled. "He's scampering; we're spotted." There was a pause before his voice sounded through the com again. "Do the same, and make sure the cannons have enough juice for a full volley. Should be enough to take him down. Pour everything else into the thrusters."

"On it Fox." Slippy's fingers raced over his console, issuing commands to the ship's systems with practiced precision. The hum of the engines accelerated into a whine as their full power was suddenly unleashed and fed into the _Great Fox_'s thrusters and forward cannons. Power meters began climbing on the viewport's HUD, while the glow surrounding the wireframe readout of the ship itself began to fade.

The _Great Fox _lurched forward, its thrusters flaring with illumination. Sophie and Jason looked at each other briefly from across the bridge, trying to gain some measure of reassurance from each other that the sudden increase in power wouldn't overload anything, as tended to happen on other ships. Katt's harsh words weren't exactly helping.

"What the _hell_ is going on up there?" she screamed, somewhere diminished in volume by the comm system. The whine of one of the engine rooms was clear in the background. "We just got these fixed and now you want to shake 'em apart again? Slippy, hon, you know I love you, but we're gonna have to have a talk about how to make things last if-"

"Its just a burn, Katt," the toad responded, his eyes focused on the viewport. "I-it won't be for long."

The yellow vapors of Sector Y continued to thin out as the _Great Fox _sped on. The faint glow of an engine block ahead of them slowly grew clearer, and from there the ship it was attached to started coming into sight as a dull outline. However, according to the radar display on Slippy's console, the Major was leading them _deeper _into the cloud, not closer to the fringes. If anything, the vapors were supposed to be getting thicker, rather than less substantial.

"It must be a pocket," Jason said, saying aloud what Slippy was thinking. "Looks like the radiation's going down too."

As if to punctuate his predication, the _Great Fox _suddenly burst into a semi-clear pocket of Sector Y, a spherical zone of less dense gas and radiation that felt almost like someone had taken a scoop straight from the cloud. On all sides of the pocket, the swirling gas wall was clearly visible as a barrier between the clear zone and the rest of the Sector. The wingtips of the carrier were trailing the yellowish vapor like rapidly dissipating streamers, so suddenly the transition had occurred. Some expanse away, the Major's ship snapped into focus, still out of range of the mercenary ship's cannons, but gradually losing ground.

And beyond the glow of the Major's engines, a third construct seemed to suddenly appear. It looked insubstantial at first, though it wasn't until Slippy put a visual zoom on it that it was clear that this effect was due to it being made up of several smaller structures in close proximity to each other.

"...What _is _that?" Fox voice said. The miniaturized version of the bridge's zoom window was just as clear in the cockpit of his Arwing.

The tubular structures formed a dotted circle, the overall shape standing upright and facing towards the approaching ships. The closer they got, gaining ground on both the Major's ship and the immobile anomaly, the more clear the visual scan became, until it was evident that the cylindrical structures were in fact both more and less natural than the observers aboard the _Great Fox_ thought.

"They almost look like rocks," Sophie noted, her eyes glued to the subwindow on the bridge's viewport, showing the structure of unattached boulders. "But what are they doing out here? And so well...arranged?"

"The Major's heading straight towards the center," Jason offered, his attention equally drawn. "So he probably knows more than us-"

A bright, flashing light on his console cut the vulpine off, causing him to cock his head in confusion. He tapped a few buttons, slowly as he was still unfamiliar with the console's layout, but managed to find what the source of the silent alert was.

"Um, Slip?" he began, putting a finger on his screen as if to not lose his place. "We're pickin' up something here. Some kind of signal-"

Jason was interrupted again by his console, although this time the warning was the deafening wail of an alarm, jolting those on the bridge upright. Slippy's hands flew over his console again, though the words flashing on the bridge viewport explained the reason for the klaxon succinctly enough.

"Power spike?" Jason shouted over the din, remembering Katt's words moments before. "Power spike where?"

Slippy finally found the right digital switch and turned off the noise, though the words still pulsed brightly on the HUD. He consulted his readouts again, finding the source of the spike. Once again though, the viewport offered more than enough of a clue as to what was causing the warning.

"Directly...ahead," Slippy trailed off as he looked at the viewport, his hands momentarily falling from the control yoke. His jaw fell open.

The Major's transport had stopped in the center of the ring of boulders, each rock about the size of the _Great Fox _itself. However, unlike the transport, the ring was no longer stationary. It had begun, slowly at first, to rotate on the axis they had approached on, the rocks spinning around the Major's ship as they picked up speed. At the same time, they had begun to glow a sickly shade of neon green, with thin veins of fluorescent material lacing their way across the craggy surfaces. As they orbited faster and faster, their outlines began to blur, becoming less and less discernible as individual entities.

As the _Great Fox _swooped closer to the bizarre structure, a sudden burst of lightening arced between the Major's transport and the rocks. It was followed closely by another, and another, each one snapping at the speed of light, the thin gas of the surrounding space conveying the noise as hollow bass _thumps. _The rocks had become a translucent green sheath they were spinning so fast, and the bolts of energy began to increase in number. The transport's engines, facing the approaching mercenaries, had completely shut down, as had all of its other outward signatures of activity.

With a start, Slippy suddenly remembered himself, and the rapidly falling number on his console, representing the distance to the Major's ship. His hands grasped the yoke again, but before he could veer away from the energetic structure they were hurtling towards, his stomach went cold.

A hand slid into his field of vision, falling on his like a gentle mother's, holding it in place. Another gold furred paw circled in from the other side, grasping his other hand, wrapping its fingers around his, and by extension, the control yoke. Slippy could feel the soft fur of their palms brushing against his amphibian skin, carefully guiding, not forcing, his hands to steer the ship forward.

The arms had come from around him, as if to embrace him from behind, which only led Slippy to wonder whose they were. It was answered as his world suddenly shifted into slow motion.

He felt a warm breath on his neck, and the soft brush on his shoulder as Linka's head appeared at the fringes of his vision, settling on his right side. The toad struggled to look at her, but she remained just at the edge of his peripheral sight, and Slippy suddenly found himself unable to turn his head away from the viewport.

Sounds slowed and faded out, like an old fashioned record player slowly losing power. Shouts and questions of concern all fed into his brain, emanating from the other two beings on the bridge, as well as the comm speakers, but they all sounded like gibberish to him. All he could concentrate on was the pressure on his hands, and the weight on his shoulder. The ring of boulders was rapidly approaching, just entering effective weapons range, something Slippy noticed only in passing as the appropriate indicator flashed far slower than usual.

The energy output of the construction in front of him was reaching worrying levels, mirroring that of an overloading reactor on a large warship. The yellowish gases of Sector Y were beginning to fade away from the viewport's field of vision, replaced by the eerie green glow, steadily brightening as the bolts of energy connecting the Major's transport to the boulders became almost constant, blurring the relatively small ship's outline amidst a swirl of crackling energy.

Every muscle in his body, every cell in his brain was telling him to get the _Great Fox _out of there, but Linka's grip was strong, her thin muscles taut and unforgiving as she used his own hands to steer the ship towards the ball of energy.

"Link, I..." he said, his own voice clear as day despite every other noise on the bridge being warped and slowed. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her turn towards him, her muzzle centimeters away from his cheek.

"Fire," she whispered, her voice also undistorted. Like a machine, he obeyed without hesitation, his fingers tightening on the triggers of the yoke of his own volition. Hers followed an instant later, but it would be after the fact that he realized she never pressed him to do it.

The stored power in the _Great Fox_'s forward cannons emptied in a salvo of linked shots, their bright yellow hue saturating the already dazzling light show of green and blue in front of them. Like massive darts from the sun, they shot through the mess, disappearing into the ball of energy. The Major's ship's outline was entirely lost at that point, the blinding glow of the fireworks around it completely shrouding the transport.

Suddenly, the rocks were practically knocking on the viewport material, and the _Great Fox _plunged forward, into the cataclysm amidst screams from the crew. There was a flash, a deafening _crack_, and then everything faded into nothing.

Nothing except the persistent, mirthful laughter of Linka in Slippy's ear.

* * *

**A/N:**

Alrighty; we're off with the Good Major sequence. Not much to say here I suppose, except that I've got the rough draft of the next part already written and am in the process of editing it.

To my reviewers (**chaosLeader **and **RedBay**), thank you again for your reviews, and I apologize that I didn't reply with proper responses here this time around. Trust me when I say that I read your reviews thoroughly, and have taken the critiques and comments to heart.

To my readers, thank you for reading my story. If there's anything you like or dislike about Star Fox: Mercenaries, why not leave a review?

-Irish Redd


	33. Chapter 33: The Good Major Pt II

**XXXIII: **The Good Major Pt II

* * *

James McCloud came to a stop before him, both foxes standing on the edge of a jagged cliff in a lifeless desert. Scorched sand stretched off in all directions, off into the dull orange sky on all sides. Red and purple clouds drifted by, defying any normal planetary wind patterns and piloting their own individual courses through the heavens. Down below them, the valley floor was cracked and ruined, heat struggling to dissipate under the ever present sun.

The stale, musty breeze brought no cooling sensation to Fox, even as it coursed through the fur exposed to the sun. Both vulpine wore brown, lightweight tunics and hoods, James with his down around his shoulders. Sand picked up and blew around their ankles, and their tails and capes fluttered in the wind, but still Fox could barely feel it. Just more dust, dry and salty on his tongue. Just more heat, sweltering to his flesh.

James' sunglasses glistened in the sun, the deep black lenses glaring the light into Fox's eyes as his father spoke. His voice was just as Fox remembered it, except for the odd, echoing trail it seemed to leave, as though he were speaking into an empty cave.

Perhaps most surreal of all, however, was the way time seemed to break down in the bleak, desolate landscape.

Like a needle skipping merrily on an old record, Fox felt like he was immersed in a holovid that had been somehow corrupted. His father spoke a sentence before he was suddenly in a slightly different position; he would be looking directly as his son one moment and then, after finishing a statement, be looking off in the distance beyond the younger fox. The clouds behind James would reset at that moment, as if time only worked while he was speaking, and then picked some random moment in the past or future to revert to during the pauses.

"You haven't forgotten her, Fox," James said, looking at his son. His head moved faster than light, and suddenly he was glaring at the sun behind Fox. The sunglasses were trained back on his son. "You never can. She won't let you."

His head swept back and forth in two frames, turning left then right and stuttering half way through. His arms were crossed at first, but were suddenly at his sides.

"Mom?" Fox asked, the only sane thing in his own reality.

"Trust your instincts, son," James said, his voice fading out and back in, now devoid of bass. "You'll find us there."

A thunder clap burst through the sky, tearing it asunder as pieces of it began to peel away, revealing a black, empty expanse beyond. The tear reached the horizon before continuing into the desert itself, spreading like cracks in glass. It raced across the valley floor, splinters of solid desert shaking and falling away from reality. Eventually, the tear reached up the cliff face to the pair of foxes, father and son, and tore the ground out from under them. Their footing fell away as though they had suddenly been sent rocketing upward, into the vast nothingness of the black above.

And yet they kept their feet, standing in the nothingness as though a floor were still present. Looking upward, Fox could see a pair of distant circles, glowing with light as they neared. As they approached, the blurred shapes within the spots of light gradually came into focus. Fox began to recognize features and familiar patterns, until he suddenly knew what the spots of light were.

It was cockpit of his Arwing, seen through his own two eyes not moments before. As they soared towards him, they merged into one, a spotlight of color and sound destined for Fox. A faint _whoosh _of wind began seeping through the blackness, quiet at first but rapidly growing into a whirlwind of sound. And yet still, no force blew their clothes or whipped through their fur.

James looked at him, taking off his sunglasses, stuttering back and forth between having them halfway off and on a few times before the needle finally settled in a groove. Time held together for a few brief seconds, even as the spotlight from above came within moments of consuming them. The hurricane of noise became unbearable.

Fox looked back at his father, the elder McCloud's eyes just how he remembered them: bright and kind. However, his irises were the same empty shade of black as the rest of their surroundings, lending an unnatural air to an already unnatural piece of existence.

Everything fell quiet.

"A warrior _fights_, Fox."

* * *

With a gasp, Fox started forward, pushing against his restraints as his mind regained its footing.

Across the com board, he could hear his teammates' similar reactions, moaning and retching for air as they snapped back into an unfractured reality. Off on his right wing in the _Great Fox_'s docking bay, he could see the tops of Miyu's pointed ears in her Arwing's cockpit, her head between her knees. Based on the sounds coming from her empty com portrait, she was having a more visceral reaction than the others, emptying her stomach's contents into the floor of her cockpit.

"Guys...I think I just saw forever," Falco said, the first to speak anything coherently. His face was pale and drained of color.

Rhena's com portrait appeared on Fox's HUD to answer the avian, but when the wolf spoke, it was the foreign dialect Fox had heard her speak when she got particularly frustrated. When she said the alien words, her eyes widened and she stopped, as if surprised herself that she wasn't speaking Lylatian. She started speaking again, most likely comenting on what she had been saying, but it too was in the unintelligible language.

"Bill, Rhade, report," Fox comanded, out of breath and coming back from the edges of utter disorientation. He had regained enough of his wits to notice the two hadn't said anything yet.

"I'm here," Bill said first, looking exhausted but probably coming out the best of all the pilots. His hair was plastered with sweat.

"Copy, Mc...McCloud," Rhade answered, speaking the first syllable of Fox's name but pausing a good second before completing it. He had the thousand mile stare of a soldier watching his friend get shot, but he was otherwise apparently unaffected physically.

"Slippy," Fox continued, "What the hell happened?"

Slippy's face appeared on the bridge portrait that unfolded, frantic and scrambling. In the background, by the railing near the captain's chair, Sophie could be seen tending to Jason, who was lying still on the bridge deck.

"I-I don't know!" the toad screeched, flipping controls off camera. The lack of bridge alarms or flashing warning lights concerned the vulpine a little, though plenty of other thoughts gladly took up the slack. Slippy's face bore the frustrated despair of one who couldn't vocalize what they were trying to explain. "The controls j-just locked up. We flew straight into that, that..._whatever _that was!"

At that moment, the sensor feed between the _Great Fox_'s bridge and Fox's Arwing was reconnected. A window opened on Fox's HUD, displaying what the carrier's forward viewport saw. And what it saw was nothing more than a wall of swirling, endless gas.

Fox peered closer. The orange gas of Sector Z.

"Slippy, where are we?" he asked calmly, staring at the digital window.

"The ship seems okay," the toad was continuing, rambling off statuses and system readouts. It occurred to Fox that he may have not even looked up at the viewport since the event.

"Slippy."

"Weapons at full, shields-" Slippy stopped, looking at the portrait of Fox on his console before looking up at the viewport above him. His eyes widened even more, and he quickly consulted his console. His mouth opened and closed a few times, breathing rapidly in and out before he managed to push the words past his vocal chords. "Sector Z," he said finally. "We're in Sector Z. Why...why are we in Sector Z?"

"We're...we're _what?_" Rhade asked, his pause-filled speech continuing.

"Did we warp somehow?" Fox asked.

"That'd explain what I saw."

"I'm not sure it does, Falco."

"It works for me, Bill. Forever's blue, by the way. In case anyone was wondering. Very blue."

"But F-fox, that's not possible. I mean, how-"

"I don't know, Slip-"

"Con-_tact_!" Miyu shouted, her portrait appearing on Fox's HUD. Her pale face was beginning to regain color, the evidence of her brief bout of sickness almost nonexistent.

Fox looked at his own sensor readout, forgetting that the lynx had requested a sensor feed from Slippy back when the mission first started. Around the center icon of the radar, representing the _Great Fox_, a trio of blips pulsed solid. One was directly off to their side and unmoving, baring the same reading as the ring of rocks back in Sector Y, while another was a short distance away, retreating further into the cloud, baring the sensor signature of a very badly damaged _Courier_. Directly in front of them lay the final vessel, turning and slowly accelerating towards them. Based on the size and shape of it, Fox guessed it was a frigate of some sort.

"Open the hanger!" Fox shouted in reply, even before the identity of the ship could be obtained. The last words of his father echoed in his mind.

Scarcely after he gave the comand, the _Great Fox _began to rumble around him, and the massive blast doors in front of his cockpit began to part, revealing the bright orange of the gas cloud beyond. Fox's presence of mind had almost entirely returned, his years of combat experience taking over for the part of his brain still reeling from what had just happened.

As the doors parted, his Arwing's own sensors snapped into focus, no longer blocked on all sides by the _Great Fox_. The vulpine began his fighter's power up sequence.

"Falco, Miyu, on me. We'll do a flyby of the frigate," he comanded, knowing the rest of the fighters in the hanger would be detecting the unknown ship momentarily if they hadn't already. "Bill, screen the _Great Fox_ until we figure out what's going on here."

"Got it. Rhena, Rhade, on my wing."

"What about the Major?" Miyu asked.

"The _Courier _can wait; if that frigate's hostile it'll tear the _Great Fox_ to shreds if we don't deal with it first," Fox replied. "And the Major isn't going anywhere fast." He spoke a little louder to catch everyone's attention, flipping switches as his Arwing began to hum with activity. "Everybody got that? The frigate is priority. Bill's flight'll intercept Wilkins once we know the _Great Fox _is safe."

A chorus of affirmatives resounded across the com. The docking bay doors had just reached the halfway point, which was enough for Fox as he keyed his Arwing's hover jets. The black and red fighter lifted off the deck, its landing struts retracting just before its main thrusters glowed to life, pushing it forward, out the hanger doors and into Sector Z.

The sterile, overhead lighting of the docking bay gave way to the massive expanse of ambient orange illumination, omnipresent in the pocket of Sector Z they found themselves in. Fox shook his head, clearing the last vestiges of confusion from his mind and focusing on the task at hand. He immediately targeted the unknown frigate in his crosshairs, spilling information onto his HUD as the brackets around the warship faded to red.

"Transponder registers the frigate as the _Cipher,_" Slippy said as Fox's HUD said the same thing. "A-allegience unknown. Pinging it now."

"That's one...one of Bauker's ships," Rhade said, off of Bill's wing as the second flight emerged from the _Great Fox_.

"There's another one of those rock circles behind the _Great Fox_," Miyu comented.

"Another one of those _what_?"

"What we flew through to get here," the lynx replied, realized she was the only fighter pilot besides Fox to see what had actually happened to cause the warp.

"Stay alert, everyone."

Fox watched the frigate grow larger in his sites, charging the approaching flights of mercenary snubfighters head on. He immediately saw the tactical advantage this gave the mercenaries, thanks to the _Great Fox_'s unique weapons loadout. Built almost like a fighter, with its primary weapons facing forward, the _Great Fox _was normally at a disadvantage in slugging matches with similarly weighted ships. However, against a single opponent at a distance, its loadout worked to its advantage.

In order to get within weapons range, the _Cipher _would have to approach head on, as it was currently doing. Being a standard warship, this meant that most of its turrets, which specialized in broadside salvos, would be unable to fire on a target directly in front of it. The _Great Fox, _with all of its offensive energy concentrated in its forward firing arc, suffered no such penalty.

"Ping complete," Slippy reported. "It's treating us as hostile; weapons are powering up. W-what should we do, Fox?"

The vulpine stayed silent, his radar suddenly catching his eye. The signature for the _Cipher _was beginning to blur, fading from a solid mark to a cloudy shape.

"The same!" Falco shouted when Fox didn't immediately respond. "Slippy, for the love of-"

"Fighters!" Miyu exclaimed over Falco's admonishment, her portrait unfolding on the teams' HUDs as she reached across her cockpit to active her shields.

The clouded radar blip of the _Cipher _resolved itself again, reappearing with a quartet of tightly clumped dots. Ahead, Fox could barely make out the tiny shapes of snubfighters, detached from external clamps on the _Cipher_'s surface. A moment later their engines flared to life, the ambient glow highlighting them more clearly as they formed up into a skirmish line in front of their frigate, four across.

"Bill, forget about the _Great Fox _and tighten up," Fox ordered, flipping the switch to power up his shields, reinforcing them in front. "We'll take the first pass, you keep 'em off our backs."

"Roger; Rhade, take point. Give us some cover with that brick of a fighter you've got."

"Typical...Cornerian." Rhade retorted, his speech pauses becoming shorter. "Always looking for something...to hide behind."

Rhena replied with something in her native tongue, unintelligible in syntax but clear in meaning by her caustic inflection.

Fox recognized the flight of enemy fighters by sight now, instantly remembering their orange, dual-hulled silhouettes from the Battle of Corneria during the Lylat War. Venom's comanders deployed them by the hundreds, attacking the vulnerable world en masse. If the Star Fox team needed any more proof the frigate was hostile, this was it.

"Invader I's," Fox called out as the two sides neared. "Slow and sturdy. Here we go."

With a delicate touch, the vulpine nudged his Arwing into alignment with one of the middle fighters, squeezing his trigger even before the targeting bracket flashed. Bolts of staccato energy lashed out, tagging the enemy's shields and lighting them up with color. He got a handful of bursts off before the first red bolts came back his way.

Fox threw his fighter into a roll, keeping his axis towards the frigate but dancing around most of the shots coming his way. Off his wing, Miyu fared more poorly, doing her best with her Arwing, but still getting lit up at least as much as her counterpart on Bauker's side was. Her shield gauge on Fox's HUD began draining, but the vulpine knew the Arwing was tough enough to survive at least the first pass.

Off his other wing, Falco had drawn the short straw, getting two Invaders in his joust. He danced and juked his fighter, avoiding most of the fire in an impressive display of mechanical acrobatics. His maneuvers allowed little time for return fire though, and his opponents escaped largely unharmed.

The two lines crossed, and while the Arwings continued on towards the _Cipher, _the Invaders continued on to face off against Star Fox's second flight. Fox put it out of his mind though, trusting his teammates' abilities and focusing on the task at hand.

"Spread out and converge on the com tower," he comanded, leveling his fighter out. "Slip inside the _Cipher's _shields and link your missiles." He paused as the bristling frigate loomed in his crosshairs. "I don't want to have to make another pass at this thing."

"I'll take lead," Falco said, boosting his thrusters enough to push him out in front of the other two Arwings by a small distance.

"Can we get that close?" Miyu asked, worry creeping into her voice.

"We'll find out, eh?" Falco replied with a grin.

Fox nodded. "Don't have a choice; we can't let it call for reinforcements. If it hasn't already. Rhade!"

"C-copy." The periods of silence were almost gone, allowing the wolf's deep, intimidating voice to come through again.

"Call the _Cipher _and see what you can do about a truce."

There was a bit of a pause before the team heard Rhade's voice again, this time without a portrait as he called the frigate.

"Frigate _Cipher_, this is Beta Rhade, loyal to Warlord O'Donnell. W-why are you showing hostilities towards us?"

There was a short pause before any response came through, the frigate growing larger and larger outside Fox's cockpit. The long, slender warship's rounded bow thrust forward, proceeded the ship like the pointed bows of ancient water-bound vessels. Above and below the hull, along the spine of the ship, a number of heavy caliber turrets sat pointed forward, though only the first gun in each row could find a solution on the approaching mercenaries. Once the Arwings were past, they would be subject to fire from the entire ship's arsenal, and while the heavier weapons were generally too slow to track the snubfighters, it only took a single blast to consume an Arwing whole.

Sitting between the first and second turret atop the frigate though, was a relatively small bump with antennas jutting upward. The com array, nestled between the two turrets like a tree in a valley.

"Beta Rhade, we destroyed your Warlord's armada a week ago," the _Cipher's _captain replied. "That name holds no value anymore. Surrender now."

Fox took a deep breath as the range light began flashing above his targeting brackets. His keen eyes caught a faint glow in the twin barrels of the frigate's foremost turret, just before the deadly energy within was unleashed.

The pair of shots pulsed through the spot Falco's Arwing occupied a moment before, scorching the avian's shields a little but otherwise passing harmlessly by. It was enough to send an unspoken signal to the flight of fighters though, and the trio of Arwings began evasive maneuvers. They rolled and twisted this way and that, avoiding the pair of turrets angling to get a shot on them.

Over the com, Fox could hear the chatter of Bill's flight engaging the _Cipher's _fighters.

Virtually on a suicide course, the Arwings pressed forward, two of them at any given time under fire from the frigate's guns, allowing the third to attempt to line up for the run on their target. The _Cipher's _gunners caught on quick enough though, and didn't leave the third fighter much time to settle before it came under fire, freeing up a different Arwing and rotating their positions.

The range counter on Fox's HUD whittled down to zero and the frigate raced upon him. Yanking back on the stick, he guided his snubfighter up and over the jutting bow, hugging the dorsal surface and narrowly avoiding a pointblank blast from the turret located there. The vulpine bounced up and over the turret, his speed allowing him only a brief glimpse of the com array. His instinct took over and his finger tightened on the trigger, loosing two missiles directly into the antenna laden blister on the frigate's surface.

A bright orange fireball spouted up behind him, tagging his own rear shields as he sideslipped to the right and shunted his weapons energy into his thrusters. Pushed back in his seat, the vulpine steered his Arwing straight ahead, traversing the frigate's spine in a matter of moments and jetting off the engine block.

"It's gone!" Miyu called out. Her fighter sprang straight up after unleashing her payload into the crater left behind by Fox's missiles, boosting away from the frigate relative north.

Fox's HUD confirmed Miyu's claim, as the _Cipher _had stopped transmitting on all frequencies. If the ship's captain had been as surprised as the Star Fox team had been by the _Great Fox_'s abrupt arrival in Sector Z, he wouldn't have had the backup systems prepared. The window of com silence they got would only be a handful of minutes, but it would be enough for the _Great Fox _to enter the fray.

"Target down!" Bill's voice called out triumphantly, one of the red blips on Fox's radar winking out of existence.

"On me!" Fox ordered his wingmates, boosting out of effective targeting range for the frigate's turrets. He winced as one of the gunners got lucky and grazed his shields. "Bill, how you holding up?"

"Doin' fine, Fox," Bill replied, his portrait grimacing as he threw his CDF fighter into another roll, evading fire from one of Bauker's fighters behind him. He managed a grin as he righted his ship, out of danger for the moment. "Thanks for asking."

"Sar'y'_leh_," Rhena shouted, emotion conveying the message her alien words could not.

Her portrait flashed as a linked shot from the Invader on her tail connected, punching through her weakened shields and striking her engine array. Her picture stabilized after a moment, though her situation did not. Fox watched as her fighter suddenly leveled out, progressing along a straight line when it had just before been manuevering and angling in nearly impossible turns.

"Covering fire!" Rhade shouted, hot on the tail of the Invader chasing Rhena's sitting duck of a ship.

By now, Fox's flight was close enough to the melee to join it, and they dove in with fury. Ignoring safety and basic tactics, the five remaining fighters deployed by the Star Fox team suddenly amped up their fire, doing everything they could to keep the remaining Invaders off of Rhena's crippled CDF fighter.

Fox pegged one of the three fighters bracketed in red on his HUD, sweeping into its wake and lighting it up with a series of blasts from his Arwing. The sturdy target weathered the onslaught, but was forced to pull away from its run on Rhena. Fox stuck with it, nudging his stick forward as it dove relative south to stay on the fighter's tail. It jittered in his crosshairs again, and another salvo from the vulpine's cannons ravaged the shields, but failed to touch the Invader's hull.

The agile Arwing kept up with the Invader as it twisted level again, accelerating unnaturally as the pilot apparently poured energy into his engines in an effort to escape the mercenary.

Lining up another shot, Fox pulled his trigger while holding a button atop the joystick. Squeezing the two inputs, he waited for a moment, saying a silent prayer to Slippy that his invention would work. Or at the very least, not backfire and detonate the Arwing from within.

A glow appeared just under Fox's fighter's nose, growing in intensity in a matter of milliseconds. The Arwing hummed, and Fox could feel the vibrations through the joystick as the capacitor Slippy had installed in the nose accumulated energy. The glow reached a steady, pulsating level. Fox checked his HUD to ensure the running Invader was indeed his registered target, and released the buttons.

With a sudden stillness, the Arwing relinquished the energy it was storing, launching a ball of crackling plasma towards the hapless Invader I. It left a barely visible trail through the gases of Sector Z, a faint afterglow marking the vapor particles formerly in its way. Relying on his fighter's durability to warn him of the vulpine's next onslaught, the pilot of Bauker's fighter awaited the energy projectile with fatal ignorance.

With a loud _crack _the sphere of energy slammed into the Invader's shields, sweeping the protection aside. Unhindered, it proceeded to consume the fighter whole. Fox watched as the Invader suddenly flared and exploded, sending components and scrap spiraling in all directions. Its energy spent, the ball disintegrated, fading away and leaving only carnage in its wake.

A shiver, equals parts amazement and terror, shot through Fox's spine as he pulled away from the wreckage, angling back towards the remaining cloud of fighters. Slippy had created something incredible; the toad deserved congratulations once they managed to find some safe harbor from the storm of questions surrounding their current situation.

"Rhena!"

The shout echoed across the com, and as his maneuver brought the battle back into view, Fox saw why. Both of the remaining Invaders were occupied, but Rhena's flat trajectory continued, leaving her vulnerable to the rapidly approaching _Cipher_. One of the gunners aboard the warship saw the target of opportunity her CDF fighter presented, and since the _Great Fox _wasn't in range, decided she was worth the time and effort.

Someone must've seen the frigate's turret swivel to target her, and called out the warning. Just then, the barrel of the turret flashed, and a con trail connected the warship to Rhena's fighter.

"_No!" _Fox's mind shouted as the wolf's ship detonated under the slug's impact, tearing itself apart as a fireball obliterated the craft from within.

"Clear out!" Slippy cried.

Before Fox's mind could recount whether he saw her eject or not, a scorching yellow light blinded him, and he instinctively rolled and goosed his thrusters. Slippy shouted his warning again, triggering another punishing blast from the _Great Fox_'s weapons.

The remaining snubfighters darted away from the ship's line of fire as a series of massive yellow darts slammed against the _Cipher_'s forward shields. Bauker's frigate returned fire, but the damage output was meager compared to the salvos it had suffered.

Amidst the waves of energy being exchanged, Fox managed to make out a much smaller explosion. Another Invader went down to Rhade's guns. And judging by the situation the final enemy fighter found itself it, under the crosshairs of a suddenly irate and emotional Bill, it wouldn't last much longer.

"P-parley! I surrender!" A new voice called over an open com channel, the strained voice of a man trying and failing to stay calm. "Don't kill me! I've got information!"

Fox's computer quickly gave the source as the sole remaining Invader, evidenced by its reduced signature as the pilot powered down his weapons. A thought occurred to the vulpine, even as Bill grudgingly broke off his attack run on the neutralized pilot: they weren't that far from the _Cipher_. Even under the duress of the _Great Fox _baring down on her, if someone on board heard what the Invader pilot had said...

In confirmation of his fears, one of the _Cipher_'s rear turrets swiveled away from the Star Fox fighters, and instead targeted its own surviving craft. It fired, narrowly missing the pilot who had wisely kept up his maneuvers, even as his Cornerian pursuer left him in peace.

Before the gunner could fire again though, the _Cipher_'s shields fell, and the _Great Fox_'s bolts bore through its front armor. Metal and steel melted and ran from the intense energy, flash freezing moments later in the icy coldness of Sector Z. As the nose of the frigate gave way under the onslaught, the solidified rivers of armor stretched out from the bow, giving it the jagged, bizarre shape of a flower blooming.

The _Cipher _tried to strike back, but the meager firepower it could bring to bear in its forward arc was easily absorbed by the _Great Fox_'s shields. As the last of the frigate's armor plating burned away, its turrets fell silent, followed immediately by the rest of the vessel as its reactor was breached and shut down. The glow of its engines faded and it began to drift, though its momentum kept the ship floating forward, directly into a fatal, final salvo from the _Great Fox_'s guns.

Fox watched as the bursts of yellow energy disappeared into the internal structure of the frigate, the final pair of bolts punching all the way through the length of the _Cipher _and emerging out the other side, taking the massive engine block with it. Chunks of debris rocketed outward as secondary explosions rocked the ship, but by then the vulpine and his pilots were far enough away to avoid any errant hunks of metal.

The _Cipher _remained largely in one piece, but it was clear that the vessel was dead, slowly rotating and drifting towards the mercenary carrier without the smallest signature of power.

Fox gently tugged the stick, swinging his Arwing back towards the _Great Fox_, noting the engine trails of some of his teammates.

"All pilots report," he said calmly, taking a breath as his adrenaline slowly began to fade.

"I'm good," Falco said, pulling out of a lazy roll to end up on Fox's wing.

"Got a little burned, but I'll pull through," Miyu reported, taking Fox's opposite wing with a little less grace than the avian. The red portions of the hull of her Arwing featured several black streaks of carbon scoring from when she inadvertently flew through the destruction caused earlier by Fox's missiles.

"Bill here..." the hound trailed off, eyes cast down as his portrait appeared on the com. Though he had been the one to survive the warp to Sector Z with barely any side effect, he suddenly looked worse than anyone else. Fox could practically read his thoughts in that moment, remembering how the Cornerian pilot looked after being rescued from the ambush back in the null river in Sector X. After surviving a fight with only a third of his squadron intact._"Not another one."_

Fox keyed his com to say something, but was interrupted by a burst of static. For a moment, he thought the distortion had rendered the new speaker's words unintelligible. It was only after he saw Bill's face, still on his HUD, brighten with relief did he realize they were in fact words. Just not of the Lylatian dialect.

"Fur'ah," the speaker said, the bite of her delivery recognizable even through the severe distortion of her voice and portrait. "Ser'y fur'ah."

"Mm; wiser words never spoken," Falco offered sagely as Bill's laugh sounded over the com.

"Ser'fa tu'leh," Rhena said flatly.

"You lupes never know when to quit, do you?" Fox said with a grin, spotting Rhena's distress beacon on his radar, some distance behind the assembling group of snubfighters.

"No we don't," Rhade answered, his expression showing an utter indifference to the situation, making Fox wonder if he even got that they were joking.

"Beta Rhade?" another new voice chimed in, though Fox quickly recognized it as the Invader pilot who had surrendered. His radar signature put him very near to Rhena's ejected cockpit, opposite the _Great Fox _from them_. _The avian was broadcasting in the open, meaning he hadn't heard any of the Star Fox team's coded chatter.

Rhade stayed quiet, implicitly allowing Fox to make a decision as to what to do with the prisoner. The vulpine pondered a moment, considering the best way to use the pilot. In the heat of the battle, Major Wilkins had slipped outside his Arwing's sensor range, and the gases of Sector Z, while not as suffocating to equipment as the other Sectors in the Lylat System, didn't help either.

"Tell him to talk to me," Fox finally said, instructing Rhade. "Let's not tip our hand just yet. Maybe he knows where the Major was headed, and why."

"I've still got his beacon on radar," Slippy piped up. "I'll start pursuing."

The vulpine nodded as he altered course, turning back towards the surrendered pilot. "Alright, then. Falco, grab Rhena and take her back to the hanger. Everyone else, form up on the _Great Fox_. Rhade, go ahead."

Fox flipped his com to open broadcast as Wolf's pilot did the same, the latter's portrait unfolding again as he spoke.

"Name and rank, pilot," Rhade said as the others formed up on the mercenaries' carrier.

"Flight Sergeant Lorenzo, sir," the pilot replied. His expression bore the faded relief of someone who realized they weren't going to die, but wasn't sure if they liked the situation they found themselves in as a result.

"Sergeant, follow behind our carrier at your current distance, and keep your weapons powered down. You'll speak to my subordinate," the wolf said, his gravely voice commanding authority. His Wolfen turned and joined up with the rest of the snubfighters, setting an intercept course with the _Great Fox._ "He'll negotiate your surrender to Wolf O'Donnell."

Fox spitted the Invader in his sights, angling up and over the approaching fighter and pulling a lazy loop, coming up behind the ship within comfortable distance for his Arwing's cannons. Falco's fighter briefly flashed by on his way to pick up Rhena's ejection vehicle, becoming the last in a train of space-borne vessels led by the _Great Fox_, cruising deeper into the cloud of Sector Z.

"Lorenzo, this is Lieutenant Reynard," Fox began, using the fake name he had taken to calling himself in public after receiving his bounty. "What was the _Cipher_'s mission here?"

"We were supposed to guard the gate until Major Wilkins-"

"The gate?" Fox interrupted.

"Yeah," the pilot replied, his avian eyebrow raising a little. "O'Donnell must have found out about the gates and sent you through to intercept the Major, yeah?" Lorenzo paused when Fox's expression of mild incomprehension didn't change. "You knew what would happen when you went through, didn't you? You...did you stumble into-"

Bauker's pilot flinched as a burst of laser fire flashed over his cockpit, narrowly missing the transparent bubble of material.

"Easy, Lorenzo," Fox warned calmly. "So these gates are _warps_ then?"

The pilot didn't respond right away, spotting the gap in knowledge and sparking an internal debate on how much of that gap he should actually fill. The dictum of war stated that he should be reasonably cooperative with his captors, but not to the extent of increasing their advantage over his fellow pilots and soldiers. The debate ended abruptly, however, when the right hull of his mount suddenly sprouted a new hole.

"Answer me, Sergeant," Fox commanded in a mild yet threatening voice. He leaned a little closer to the com camera, curling his lips into a smirk that showed his front incisors. "I've shot down more Invaders than I can count. I know where to punch a hole in empty hull, and where to severe the life support line." He paused at let his words sink in. "I don't want to space you, but there's a row of kill silhouettes on my hull that needs a crosshatch."

Lorenzo involuntarily recoiled a little as Fox leaned closer, his posture sagging. "Y-yeah," he stammered. "It's like a warp." He quickly added, "I only know of the one though; they don't explain the network to snub pilots."

Falco's Arwing cruised past Fox's, baring the disembodied cockpit of Rhena's CDF fighter magnetically clamped beneath it. The mercenary avian was expending a bit of fuel by using his afterburners to catch up with the _Great Fox_ while baring his burden, but it was possible more of Bauker's forces were lying in wait in the cloud, and Falco wanted to be combat able as soon as possible. After all, who else on the team had the skill to defend their home?

"Ever been through it, Lorenzo?" Fox asked.

"Just once," the pilot replied, suppressing a shudder. "They told us there were some mental side effects your first time through, and they weren't joking. Messes with the brain pan a bit."

Fox nodded. That would explain the crew's visceral reactions to unwittingly following the Major through the Sector Y gate.

The _Great Fox, _its escorts, and a pair of fighters trailing behind her left the gate's pocket, plunging back into the obscuring gases of Sector Z. Still, Fox trusted Slippy to know where he was going, and how to get there smartly, without revealing themselves until it was necessary.

"So you were guarding the gate and waiting for Wilkins," Fox prompted. "Where is he headed now?"

"I...don't know," the pilot admitted, his expression sinking a little. "I know what that sounds like, but I honestly don't know of any stations around here that-"

Another linked blast tore through his Invader, this time erupting out of his left hull. A warning light sprang to life in his cockpit, indicating that the primary life support had been severed, and that the auxillery system was kicking in.

"Did I get your life support on that one?" Fox asked with mock curiosity. "Don't worry, your backup should get you halfway to Macbeth."

"I don't _know_!" Lorenzo shouted desperately, struggling a little with his fighter. "There's no station within five-"

"He's gotta be going somewhere, Sergeant."

"Unless...unless he's going to the _Broadsword_."

Fox paused. "Is that a warship?" Was the _Great Fox _about to find trouble above its weight?

Lorenzo nodded. "Yeah, it was a Cornerian cruiser. Got knocked out during a battle here a little while back and our salvage teams just found it again."

Fox reasoned the Major's logic out as he opened a private channel to Bill. If the _Courier _was badly damaged, Wilkins would seek friendly ground wherever he could find it, even if it was just a salvage operation. "Bill, does the name _Broadsword _ring any bells for you?"

There was a slight delay as the hound thought about it. "I think so. I remember seeing a public kill report from a Seventh fleet battle out here right after Yohan Depot, and I'm pretty sure it was listed as the top Cornerian casualty. Cruiser, if I'm not mistaken."

Fox switched back to an open broadcast.

"Would a salvage op like that be guarded?"

"I couldn't say," Lorenzo said honestly.

"Take a guess."

"Rhena's down in the _Great Fox_," Falco said over the coded channel, briefly interrupting Fox's side of the conversation. "Coming back out."

"Probably not heavily," Lorenzo offered, trying to balance what his captors would want to hear and not giving away information that would cause the deaths of his fellow soldiers. "We didn't know anyone knew about the gates, so I doubt they put too much into defending it."

"Contact!" Slippy cried as the _Great Fox _and its escorts broke into another clear pocket in the cloud. Fox and his prisoner followed a moment later.

Hanging in space ahead of them was a broken, battered hulk of a Cornerian cruiser, blackened and charred by some sort of explosion that had spelled its demise. Parts of it had been torn and blasted away, its formerly elegant lines marred and disrupted by jagged edges where wings and components used to be. The hulk itself had almost no exterior lights that Fox could immediately see, though the ambient orange glow of Sector Z lit up the worn letters making up the name _Broadsword _on the ship's hull.

Except for a few small chunks hovering off the close end of the blunted bow, the wreck was surprisingly free of debris, leading Fox to believe whatever weapon had knocked it out had blasted any errant pieces away. The whole construction had the look of a large, dead carcass, lying there and waiting for nature to take its toll.

However, attached to the top of the cruiser and immediately drawing the eye was the salvage ship. Nearly pristine in comparison, the frigate-sized vessel sat like a tumor, exterior spotlights and its bright radar signature pulsing life into the morbid scene. Extremely close to the _Broadsword, _silhouetted by the faint glow of its docking bay, the only light coming off the cruiser, Fox thought he could make out the smaller outline of the _Courier._

For a moment, everything was peaceful as Fox watched the rear of the _Great Fox _swing a little, lining up with the salvage vessel. A radar ping caught his attention, and he glanced down at his console.

"A distress beacon?" he whispered aloud in confusion, noting that it seemed to be originating from inside the _Broadsword_. "Who would send out a distress-"

"That's a Cornerian frequency!" Bill shouted. "There's still people in there!"

The scene erupted as the _Great Fox's _guns once again flared to life. For a moment, Fox thought Slippy was aiming for the wreck itself, ignoring Bill's warning that there might be Cornerians alive inside. However, the yellow darts lanced through the growth just above the _Broadsword_, puncturing the unshielded salvage frigate and leaving four gaping holes spouting flames. The ship only help together for another moment before a multistage explosion tore it apart, peppering the _Broadsword_'s hulk with debris. The cruiser's armor, still largely intact, shrugged off the bombardment, holding together for the most part.

Destroying the unarmed ship was a bold move for the characteristically peaceful toad, but one Fox realized would ultimately have to be done. The _Courier _appeared to have been too badly damaged to get a com signal out, meaning the salvage frigate probably had the only working long range com system Wilkins could use to call for help.

"Alright Lorenzo, here's the deal," Fox said, the brief burst of small weapons fire ahead of him catching his eye as his teammates engaged a pair of woefully outmatched escort fighters. "You don't seem like the martyr type, so I'm gonna to trust you to land in my carrier's hanger. I'll follow you in. If you try to call for help or power up your weapons, you _will_ die. Clear?"

"Clear, Lieutenant," the avian replied, looking a little unsure, but knowing he had no other choice.

* * *

"Good. The hanger's in front. Lead the way, Sergeant."

"Rhade, I'll distract and you take 'em out."

"Don't let them get inside the _Great Fox_'s shields!"

"There's only two of 'em, Miyu; keep your spots on."

"There was only two of _us_, Falco, and the _Cipher _don't seem any better for it."

"Looks like the Major just docked."

Slippy watched the last pieces of the salvage frigate tear themselves apart, his hands shaking a little. Beneath the view the bridge viewport allowed, a half dozen snubfighters danced a quick, one sided dance of death. But all he could see was the debris cloud left behind by the salvage ship's destruction. He was alone on the bridge, Sophie having left moments before to see if Rhena had needed any medical attention. Jason had slowly followed her, still groggy from his trip through the Sector Z gate.

"Why did you make me do that!" Slippy squeaked.

"You have to trust me," Linka replied innocently, standing behind him and bracing her arms on the back of his chair. "You had to."

"T-trust?" he asked in a voice approaching shrill. He spun around to stare at her. "How can I trust you? You're not even a person; y-you're not _real_! And that ship was unarmed!"

"That ship wasn't unarmed." She replied as if calling out a bluff. The young coyote never took her eyes off of the viewport, staring above the toad with casual interest in the _Broadsword _outside. Linka shrugged. "And since when do you have to be a real person to be trusted?"

Slippy sputtered, slowly turned back towards the control yoke. He didn't have an answer for her. He brought the _Great Fox_'s forward motion to a halt as Fox's voice broke through the bridge's com speakers.

"Slippy, boost your radar as much as you can," he said, pausing as Rhade and Miyu gave kill reports. "I'm bringing everyone in, and I don't want surprises while we're talking."

* * *

**A/N:**

I think I'm starting to like the idea of shorter chapters. Also, I've got a question, sort of on that topic.

A few of my reviewers now have mentioned, thanks to my irregular (to put it nicely) update schedule, how difficult it is to recall plot details from earlier chapters. Considering that, do you think that you, the reader, would benefit from a plot recap at the beginning of the next chapter (or some time in the near future)? Just a brief, couple pages recalling important details and events that happened in the past, so you don't have to go and reread stuff from literally years ago to catch on to some important plot point?

Anyway, just a thought; let me know in a review if you have a strong opinion one way or the other. On to reader reviews:

chaos Leader: Thank you cL; I've been told good things about my action writing in the past - whether or not its true is another thing entirely :) - but one on one dialogue and atmosphere is somewhere I feel I'm lacking, and I've been trying to pay closer attention to it recently. Your words are too kind.

RedBay: Thanks RedBay! I'm glad you picked up on everything you did; your descriptions of those events are pretty much exactly what I was going for. That review made me smile to read. Hopefully this chapter isn't a step backward!

AndrossKenobi: I'm sorry! As soon as I read your review I went back and reread my reviews, and sure enough, there yours was, lonely and unreplied to. Won't happen again, I promise. Thanks for the review! Hopefully this chapter sated some of your curiosity :)

The Frustrated: Thanks for the kind words! Your enjoyment means I must be getting better at something, which makes me happy. And by the way, if you don't have time to leave a longer review, don't even worry about it. Yours got your point across just fine.

Um, what else? Changing the little preview spiel on the search page, adding the genre tag (should've done that a long time ago)...anything else? Anything I could do to improve the story? Anything I'm doing right? Anything I'm doing exactly 'okay' at? Let me know! I promise (sorry again AndrossKenobi) that I'll reply to each and every review left on this story.

-Irish Redd


	34. Chapter 34: The Good Major Pt III

**XXXIV: **The Good Major Pt III

The main docking bay of the _Great Fox _was more packed than ever, the loss of Rhena's CDF fighter not quite making enough room for the Invader I sitting in its place. There had been some shuffling of ships, and some awkward landing patterns and tight fits, but they had managed to get everyone's mounts settled in place. The only area more than a few people could gather was near the door to the rest of the ship, and it was here that the entire team, minus Slippy, found themselves gathered in a circle.

"So we've got two objectives here," Fox started, arms crossed and business in his stare. "Kill or capture Major Wilkins, and find out who lit the distress beacon. Conveniently, they both lead us into the _Broadsword. _Any ideas? Thoughts?"

Falco raised a hand, as if forgetting for a moment that he wasn't in a classroom. "Um, I've gotta question." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the captured pilot, Lorenzo, restrained and seated against the hull of his battered Invader I fighter. His head was hanging low, the avian knocked out cold thanks to a dose from Sophie. "What's _he_ doing here? That tanker of his is an eyesore."

Fox nodded at Rhade, smiling a little at the mostly true statement about the big, ungainly Venomian fighter, especially compared to the sleek snubfighters that occupied the rest of the bay. "I talked it over with Rhade, and he thinks that the pilot might be of use to Wolf for information. And he agreed to negotiate a bonus for us once we turn him in." He smiled a little more. "And I figure we could always sell off that _tanker _if we can't find a use for it."

Falco shrugged, satisfied with the answer. "Works for me."

Miyu raised her hand, following the precedent Falco had started. "Not to get off topic, but what exactly are we doing here?"

Fox cocked his head.

"_Here_. Sector Z." She blanched a little as she recalled her reaction to whatever had transported them across the Lylat system. "What...what _was _that?"

"According to the pilot, _that_...was a wormhole," Fox answered.

The crew's reactions ranged from Katt's deadpan stare, to Rhena's silent gaze of vague disapproval, to Bill's wide-eyed shock. Silence reigned for a few moments as everyone took in what had just been said. It was obvious that a wormhole was the only semi-logical explanation for what they had experienced, but the very science of it was impossible to wrap the head around. Even the more formerly educated of the group, Sophie and Jason, were unable to keep a look of disbelief from their faces.

"Lorenzo said that Bauker's known about the wormhole for a little while now, stretching back to at least the Lylat War. Apparently there's a system of them, linking Lylat's 'Sectors'," Fox nodded at the pilot, far enough away to be out of earshot, not that the unconscious man could hear anything. "But that's not of concern as of present. Right now-"

"It kinda concerns me," Falco chimed in, getting a sound of agreement from Jason. "If I'm not mistaken, Sector Z puts us in Warlord territory, no?"

"It does," Rhade replied for Fox, stepping into the conversation. "But the mission should be what matters. You're mercenaries. You don't complete the objective, you don't get paid."

"Payment's no good if you're not around to spend it."

"Enough," Fox said, raising his voice a little. Falco and Rhade fumed at each other for another moment before giving their attention to the vulpine. "Rhade's got a point. We complete the contract, then we worry about how to collect. One thing at a time."

"We're at a stalemate with that part though, aren't we?" Bill asked, looking around at the others. "I mean, sure, Wilkins isn't going anywhere with us out here, but we can't exactly storm an occupied cruiser." Rhena said a word of agreement, though her sudden inability to speak Lylatian was still apparently in effect.

"She's not really occupied though, is she?" Jason said, holding an icepack to his temple. His reaction to the wormhole gate had resulted in an ungraceful face to face meeting with the metal deck on the _Great Fox_'s bridge. "Salvage teams are mostly automated to avoid accidents with faulty on board systems, or intruder defenses in the case of a warship. And the foremen stay aboard the entry vessel, which Slippy so kindly blew to hell for us."

Katt nodded in agreement. "Probably just a few techs and mechanics wandering around, looting whatever catches their fancy."

"And we know _they_ never put up a fight," Falco quipped.

"Their defenses didn't put up much of a fight, either," Miyu added as Jason and Katt smirked at Falco. "If it were an occupation, wouldn't there be more hardware around? More snubfighters, ships with guns?"

"Unless they're trying not to attract attention," Bill commented.

"Well out here I'd say attention is pretty hard to attract," Miyu replied, lifting a hand to make her non-confrontational argument. "We didn't even know the cruiser was here until we practically stumbled over it."

Bill canted his head from side to side, conceding the point.

"So we go in," Jason said, offering the first coherent solution. "Send a few guys, take the Major, say 'oy' to a few salvage drones, and get back out." He paused. "Oh, and track down that beacon, too," the grey fox quickly added, glancing at Bill.

Fox rolled the plan around in his head a bit, staring at the worn, dirty deck plates of the hanger. It seemed like the easiest, most elegant solution they had. The faces and roles of each his teammates rushed through his head as he quickly reasoned out where they would fall in the scheme of things. His head bobbed a little before looking back up at Jason.

"I think that sounds about right," he said. "Alright, Falco, Miyu, and I will board the _Broadsword_, since we still have that armor Wolf's boys gave us. The Major's _going_ to put up a fight, so I don't want to take chances down there by giving him any soft targets. Katt, would you mind giving us a lift?"

"Not a problem, hon," she replied with a smile.

"I will come too," Rhade added, more of a statement than a request. "I have some armor and supplies of my own in my Wolfen."

Fox nodded, continuing his briefing in stride. "Bill, you'll fly cover with Rhena." He turned to the female wolf. "You okay to fly?"

The red haired pilot shot him a deadpan look, as if daring the mercenary to suggest otherwise. While the near death experience of losing her fighter, and the subsequent ride in the ejection seat might have caused some pilots to flinch, at least in the short term, Rhena was under no such duress. If anything, she seemed more resolute than ever to perform her duty.

"Lo'y'seh," she said, gesturing at the relatively untouched CDF fighter behind the vulpine. Linka's spare mount. "So'tuh Linka'seh ro."

"We call that _spaceship_," Falco offered, wryly sounding the word out. _"Spa-ace, shi-ip. _Makes a sound like _fveeeewww." _Rhena glared daggers at the gesturing avian. He stopped, folding his arms in mock frustration "What? I'm just trying to help."

"What about me?" Sophie asked with enthusiastic apprehension. "If there's a distress beacon on board somebody might be hurt, and I can pilot the other shuttle in case we have survivors who-"

"No," Bill interrupted, shaking his head and looking at his fiance standing next to him. "Absolutely not, Sophie; you're not going on that ship. Not until-"

"It might be too _late _for someone if I wait!" Sophie replied back at him. "And what if someone here gets shot?"

Bill opened his mouth to reply but suddenly became aware of the silence from the other seven people gathered around. He stopped and looked down, licking his lips and lowering his voice. "Sophie, they can bandage a wound just fine themselves, and if _you _get hurt, what will happen when _they_ get all torn up?" He paused and looked at Fox. "No offense."

"None taken."

Sophie lowered her voice a little as well, staring up at the taller hound with resolution. "First of all, I've seen their stitches, and no, they can't pack a wound." She looked at Fox. "No offense."

Fox smirked. "None taken."

"And second, _dear, _I was trained as a _combat _medic. Combat. As in, bang, bang, pow. I can handle myself just fine." A beat passed as she too realized with slight mortification that their spat was occurring practically on a stage for the other members of the Star Fox team. She glanced a little shyly at Fox, though her eyes still reflected her determination. "I would like to go with you."

Fox accepted the request and waited a moment, looking over at Bill and waiting for a protest. He knew that the hound wasn't trying to come off as controlling; it was only concern for his fiance's safety that was fueling his argument. When a rebuttal didn't come though, the vulpine nodded. "Alright. You said you know how to pilot?"

She nodded enthusiastically. "Mmhm! Just shuttles and utility craft, but I got my certificate at the academy."

"Okay then," Fox said, a slightly altered plan forming in his head. "Katt will take half of us, and Sophie, you'll take the assault shuttle with the other half. After we board, you'll stick with us." He caught a glare from Bill before looking back at the chestnut canine. "Er, _behind _us, rather. Safely behind us."

Fox clapped once, all of the puzzle pieces snapping together in a flash. "Alright. Bill and Rhena, mount up and get ready to fly us in. Be prepared for anything; they may be holding a few fighters back until we launch a boarding party."

He turned to Katt and Sophie. But before he could speak, the ladies gave his orders for him.

"Prep the shuttles?" Katt asked with a sly grin, knowing the answer already.

"I'll grab my med bag," Sophie added.

Fox smiled, turning to the avian and lynx. "Falco and Miyu, get your armor and grab some weapons from Jason." A beat. "Jason, how do you feel about coming along?"

Jason's expression sank from an eagerness to assist to a nauseous glaze. "Um...not good?" Several moments passed as he looked around, sensing his teammates' eyes on him like spotlights on a criminal trying to escape from prison. Somewhere in that sea of judgmental illuminations, he remembered that he too had a suit of armor from Wolf's soldiers. And as he desperately clawed to the surface of that sea, the desire to stand by his friends suddenly began to outweigh his fear of going.

The grey fox sighed. "Rear guard, at least?"

Fox grinned, all but slapping him on the back with his expression. "Glad to have you with us. Stay with Katt and the shuttles once we board. There shouldn't be too much resistance, but like I said, no risks." Jason nodded with reluctance, half of him mad at the other half for agreeing to go back into a combat zone.

Katt tossed Jason a playful look. "Countin' on you, hon." Jason smiled back, blushing a little and suddenly finding a little more resolve in his reservoir.

"Rhade?" Fox finished, turning to the only person not mentioned yet.

The wolf stared back at the vulpine, meeting his eye and nodding once, his expression nothing but business.

"Good. Then let's do it. Fast as you can, report in when you're ready."

With that, the circle broke, each member of the Star Fox team knowing their duty and moving to prepare for it. Katt and Sophie's voices could be heard already coordinating their flight to the _Broadsword, _along with Falco's query to Jason as to whether or not the gray fox remembered where the avian put his armor. The clacking of boots and shoes on the metal deck of the hanger echoed through the open space, followed closely by the mechanical sounds of cockpits opening and the start up sequence of a CDF fighter.

Fox watched his friend approach amidst the flurry of movement, knowing from the hound's expression what he was going to say even before he said it.

"Fox," Bill began, stopping before him and looking the vulpine in the eye. His muzzle was pulled into a thin line, his voice somewhere between commanding and beseeching. Amidst the roar of Rhena's new mount's engine flaring to life, his words held their own. "You protect her, man. You protect her-"

"Like she was you," Fox answered with understanding. He gripped his friend's shoulder for a moment as they stood there. Bill nodded, slapping Fox's other shoulder with a small smile and moving on, making his way to his own CDF fighter.

Nothing more needed to be said.

* * *

The four ships formed a diamond as they came together, flying up and above the _Great Fox _from behind and skimming the dorsal surface.

A pair of CDF fighters flew at the flanks, drifting forward as the formation began crossing the short space between the carrier and the derelict cruiser before them. Their sights were trained squarely on the horizontal slit of light of the _Broadsword_'s hanger, the only light shining from the otherwise dark ship. The magnetic shielding of the hanger kept their radars from detecting any fighters held within, and the illumination obscured any visual contact on what was waiting for them.

The crews of the two shuttles were quiet for the most part, having a rough idea of what to expect within the cruiser, but no real certainties. In front, the assault shuttle acted as the vanguard for the formation, its reinforced shielding standing between any surprise assailant and the more vulnerable, modified Invader III fighter trailing behind it.

Katt sat in the pilot's chair of the latter craft, gently guiding her ship along its route. Her long nailed, pink furred finger tapped nervously on the com switch with enough force to make a clicking sound_, _though not enough to activate the system. Behind her, in the small space available, stood three armed and armored soldiers, checking their equipment one last time.

Miyu and Jason, dressed in the armor they had received from Wolf's men, were talking about the very mission during which they had been given their protection. Miyu laughed as the vulpine professed his actual bravery during the raid on the Blue Arrow freighter, insisting with a smirk that his twitchy jumpiness had all been a front. She ratcheted the bolt of her assault rifle a few times, making sure it caught and slid smoothly with each pull. The lynx wasn't entirely sure performing the action multiple times would do anything, but the sound of the bolt catching and releasing was reassuring to her for some reason. Jason's pistol sat in its holster on his belt, next to the shoulder bag containing his electronic tools.

Rhade stood off a little bit, checking and rechecking his own rifle and refusing to participate in the others' conversation. His armor was of the same basic type as that of Miyu and Jason, but the light, resistant chest piece and leggings seemed more ornate, trimmed with more of the red and less of the black while still maintaining Wolf's traditional color scheme.

Katt's finger finally depressed the com switch, the feline allowing her nervous thoughts to get the best of her.

"Hey Sophie, you've got those shields double front, right?" she asked.

"Um, yeah," the chestnut canine replied from her pilot's chair, glancing at a readout just off screen to make sure. "Double front. Yep!"

"Okay," Katt replied, her portrait expressing equal parts relief and nerves. "Just checkin', sweetie."

Sophie hummed a response that didn't get picked up by the com, severing the connection and refocusing on her piloting. The unfamiliar control board spread out beneath her fingertips like the coded letters of some ancient typing machine. She had the basics down without too much trouble, but anything more involved than the fundamentals of flight control were out of her zone of knowledge. She could make educated guesses of course, but she hadn't flown anything for years, and getting back into the swing of things was never easy. She wisely decided to keep her troubles to herself.

The young canine turned around, eying her passengers. She knew in an emergency that they could both take over her seat in a pinch, and probably do a much better job than she. But they were busy at the moment, making her ability to fly, even if only in a very rudimentary sense, valuable.

Fox and Falco were just finishing the process of strapping into their armor, tightening hidden buckles and making sure everything was fitting right. Fox's assault rifle lay in a convenient rack next to him, along with Falco's shotgun. The shuttle was full of little features like the weapon rack. The vulpine had never taken the time to really look over the small craft, and as he glanced around, strapping on his helmet, he regretted not familiarizing himself with the shuttle. Bins and holders abounded, underlining the word _assault _in the shuttle designation.

Fox pressed the com link attached to his ear, speaking into the thin, wiry microphone that trailed down his cheek.

"Com check," he said, hearing his own voice coming back at him through the assault shuttle's speakers. Falco turned to him and nodded, tapping his own ear com in confirmation before going back to working on his armor.

"Loud n' clear," Miyu's voice came back through the tiny speaker.

"Rhade, sounds fine," Rhade answered succinctly.

"You're comin' through my speakers clear," Katt finished, referring to her shuttle's com speakers, a headset being unnecessary for her.

"Alright, just to review," Fox continued, looking over his weapon again. "Once we land-"

"Trouble!" Bill's portrait shouted from Sophie's HUD.

Fox's head snapped to look, just in time to catch a flurry of laser bolts slam into his shuttle's forward shields, apparently bursting forth from the glare of the _Broadsword's _docking bay lights. The transport rocked as Sophie struggled to stay on course, but the doubled protection held, and the sources of the barrage blazed past the front viewports, revealing themselves as a pair of Invader II fighters. Fox could briefly see the flare of Bill and Rhena's engines as they pulled a quick loop to engage, breaking away from the pair of shuttles.

"Hurry up and land, we've got you covered," the hound reported, cool and calm.

While first impressions would've led Fox to believe that Sophie would hesitate or freeze up as her fiance was thrown back into combat, the chestnut canine surprised him by wordlessly pressing forward. The shuttle lurched as an extra boost of fuel was dumped into the thrusters, and suddenly the hanger was racing towards them, the bright lights within flaring to encompass the shuttle's windows as errant laser blasts from the dogfight around them lanced dangerously close by.

Bill and Rhena worked in tandem, alternating their targets wordlessly and on the fly. Their targets were competent pilots, to be sure, but the Cornerians had sheer ability and determination on their side. The fact that Bill was eminently familiar with the Invader II snubfighter's abilities from previous engagements certainly didn't hurt, either. Whenever one of Bauker's pilots would get a bead on the vulnerable shuttles, the CDF fighters would seem to materialize on the offending pilot's tail, dogging him mercilessly until the Invader II broke off the attack.

And then the shuttles were inside.

The _Broadsword's _hanger was squat and small for a ship its size; in the Cornerian Navy, a _Cruiser _class vessel wasn't built to carry snubfighters. It was a bruiser, built for direct combat with other vessels in its weight class and below. As such, its single hanger bay wasn't much larger than that of a smaller vessel such as the _Great Fox_, with room for a few utility shuttles and their escorts.

After Sophie's eyes cleared from the momentary blindness caused by the hanger's overhead lights, she let out a tiny yelp. The docking bay was cluttered with loose material and scattered crates of equipment, most of it likely knocked loose from whatever calamity befell the _Broadsword_. But it was coming too fast, causing the canine pilot to jerk the controls to the left and throw her shuttle into full reverse. At the same time, a burst of _pings _shuttered the transport, as though it were being pelted by rocks.

"Small arms," Falco instinctively commented, bracing himself on the shuttle's hull to deal with the sudden centrifugal maneuvers by Sophie.

Fox winced as another slug ricocheted off the assault shuttle's armor plating. He knew the protection would hold against whatever Bauker's soldiers in the hanger could throw at them. The vulpine also knew that he and his team had to leave the shuttles at some point, and it only took two guns to pin them inside their respective ships.

"Katt," he commanded, touching his ear com. "Flash 'em."

"Just this once, Foxie," the feline replied, only the faintest hint of flirtatious sarcasm at his choice of words in her voice.

Sophie brought the front of the shuttle around just in time to watch Katt's ship tear through the hanger, towards the hallway door to the rest of the _Broadsword_. There, a squad of soldiers were taking cover behind a series of metal crates, half of them still aiming at the assault shuttle, while the other half were frantically warning the first half about the modified Invader III hurtling towards them.

Katt waited as long as she felt she could before jerking her control stick to the right and stomping on the rudder pedal, slewing her craft like an automobile on ice. As it swung around, she goosed her thrusters, canceling her forward momentum and causing the glowing engine cones to erupt flame.

The soldiers leaped to cover behind the metal crates as the fatally intense heat of the shuttle's engines traced overhead, creating a solid black line of charred paint and steel on the wall behind them. Their cover held, though the paint of the boxes bubbled and cracked as the thrusters passed overhead.

As the shuttle completed its semicircle, it began to drift back towards the magnetic seal of the docking bay, searching for a spot clear of debris to settle to the deck.

A soldier poked his head up, his fur singed black from the close brush with the extreme heat. He stood fully and glanced around in a slight daze, quickly spotting the retreating shuttle, but before he could shout to his comrades, a bullet abruptly took up residence in his body, followed quickly by another, and another.

Bauker's man crumpled to the ground, followed closely by another before the remaining soldiers returned fire against their new assailants. Fox and Falco crouched low as they ran, weapons to their eyes as they found a fallen support girder from the ceiling as cover and ducked behind it. Twenty meters or so separated them from the door to the hanger and Bauker's remaining men.

The air became thick with metal as the two sides faced off, the mercenaries unable to get more than a few shots off before being chased back into cover. Bullets screamed overhead and pinged off the girder, pinning the pair in place. A slug ricocheted off the top, causing Fox to flinch and duck a little lower down. He touched his ear com, glancing over at where Katt had just set down, ignored for the moment by Bauker's soldiers.

"Rhade, Miyu, a little distraction would be welcome," he barked as Falco rose to a knee and took another potshot with his shotgun. He jerked back into cover as a guard scored a graze across the avian's scalp.

"On it," Miyu replied over the com.

Above the din of the gunfire and the roar of the shuttle's engines, Fox heard the hiss of a hatch opening on the far side of Katt's ship. Moments later, a relieving source of gunfire made itself known, but not from the direction he was expecting.

Fox whipped his head around. Across the hanger, Sophie was leaning out of the hatch to the assault shuttle, stiffly aiming a pistol at the soldiers and unloading the clip as quickly as she could. Her shots went wide in nearly every direction, but the medic's accuracy wasn't important. Just as her last bullet was fired, the soldiers discovered where she was shooting from and refocused on the chestnut canine. As their first attacks threw sparks off her shuttle's armor around her, she looked at her pistol with confusion, wondering why the weapon had stopped firing, the sudden burst of adrenaline in her system rendering her unaware it had run out of ammunition.

A near miss caused her to stumble back into the shuttle, out of view and safe for the time being. At that moment, Miyu and Rhade circled around their craft, weapons raised and angrily spitting metal.

Suddenly under attack from three angles, the soldiers panicked, unable to suppress every direction. The hail of metallic _pings _off the girder stopped, and the mercenaries taking cover there didn't waste any time.

Fox and Falco rose up, adding their fire to the fray. Soon, the number of soldiers fell to a couple, and they firmly refused to expose themselves. With superior numbers and position, Fox rose further to his feet and approached, careful to keep his weapon's sights squarely on where he imagined the last soldiers were. Falco's footfalls fell in line close behind him.

As he loomed over the metal crates, Fox leaped atop them, the loud _clang _of his boots startling the cowering soldiers below him. The vulpine dispatched the one directly below him with two quick shots before the remaining soldier snapped off a reflex shot on the mercenary, sending him sprawling from his perch to the deck. In doing so, the guard exposed himself to Falco's shotgun, and fell without ever realizing his mistake.

From the floor, Fox realized that the sound of his struggling for air was alone in the hanger, all other activity having fallen silent. Silent, save the rapidly approaching footsteps of a light body.

"Are you hit?" Sophie shouted, skidding to the stop beside the fallen mercenary, already slinging her medical kit.

Fox coughed again as he waved her off, shaking his head. The air knocked from his lungs prevented him from explaining that it was merely that; air knocked from his lungs. A fresh gash across his armor gave testament to the protection's effectiveness, and the shallow angle of the bullet. The team gathered around the vulpine as he managed to push himself into a sitting position.

Fox took a deep breath, exhaling until another coughing fit overtook him. "Everyone okay?" he struggled between gasps.

"Yeah," Falco replied, cocking the breech on his shotgun's ammunition tube and loading shells in. He turned to Rhade. tapping a shell on the fresh scar across his shoulder plate before loading it. "Tell whoever designed your armor that it works like a charm."

Rhade stared back. "Venom Mark IV Infantry Armor. The designer defected to us after Lord O'Donnell left Venom's remnants. Designed the generation specifically for us. Probably died when the Seventh Fleet took out our base."

Falco blinked, cocking his head. "...Was he wearing his armor?"

"We should probably get moving," Miyu interjected, planting the stock of her rifle on her hip.

"Yeah." Fox cleared his throat, swallowing as he rose to his feet, leaning on Sophie's shoulder until he got reoriented. "The Major docked at one of the exterior ports, which means he's got a head start to wherever he's looking to be. Let's get after him."

* * *

Major Wilkins cringed as he jogged through the corridors of the _Broadsword_, ignoring the occasional salvage drone he ran across and asking any sentient beings where their commander was. Word had been sent upon his arrival on the ship, but the cruiser was of a new design, and the former Cornerian officer was unfamiliar with the layout of the hallways. And with his pursuers already launching shuttles to board the ship, directions were frantically given. Gradually, the foremen and scavenging tech specialists gave way to armed soldiers as he got closer to the CO, preparing to resist the mercenaries if they attempted to pass through.

The only member of the Major's ship's crew to survive the damage it had received was the pilot_. _The _Great Fox _had manged to score a near direct hit on the _Courier_ moments before the jump from Sector Y, devastating the much smaller vessel. Both of his personal guards had been in sections of the ship abruptly opened to the vacuum of space, while the com officer had suffered a fatal breakdown, caused by the combination of the gate's mental side effects and extreme trauma caused by his pursuer's assault. The result wasn't a pretty sight: a man whole in body, but utterly absent in mind.

Wilkins winced thinking about it as he reached the room he was looking for, his pilot trailing close behind. A pair of guards saluted as he stopped in front of them, opening the double doors and allowing the Major access to the room beyond.

Leaving the dull and damaged gray of the corridor, Wilkins was greeted by a man in a captain's uniform leaning over an impromptu desk, basically a pile of twisted metal which happened to have a flat surface. A lieutenant hovered nearby, speaking quietly but firmly into his com unit. The room was lit by emergency lights, throwing shadows from discarded equipment and broken pieces of structure against the warped and damaged walls. The captain looked up from a datascreen he was intently studying, immediately snapping to attention when he recognized the leopard.

"Major," the subordinate said, offering a quick salute. "Captain Bridges. I never got word from command of your arrival. I'd have offered a proper welcome, but things have very quickly gone to hell since you appeared on radar." Despite having his home ship destroyed, the captain spoke calmly, though with an edge of intensity that was unmistakable.

The Major nodded, taking a moment to catch his breath. This captain had a situational practicality that Wilkins immediately took appreciation for. Deciding not to waste time with a full explanation, he took a clip of carbon files from his side bag, handing them back to his pilot.

"We were ambushed going through the gate, and yours was the first friendly place to go to ground at," the Major said, looking around the improvised office. "Scanner?" The captain gestured towards his lieutenant, who briskly stepped towards the door. Major Wilkins gestured to his pilot, who followed the subordinate officer out of the room, leaving the pair alone. A moment passed before the Major spoke up again. "What's the purpose of your operation here, Captain?"

"Initially, sir, salvage and recovery," Bridges replied, folding his hands behind his back. "The _Broadsword _was the station of a number of Cornerian officers who Admiral Gage classified as risks to our operational security. After our fleet took it down, it was the job of myself and my unit to make sure the information, and risks, within it _stayed_ down." The captain paused a moment, tilting his head a little. "Salvage hasn't been bad, either."

"Initially?" Wilkins asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Initially," the captain confirmed. He paused a moment, mulling over how to properly explain himself. "After we made the first breach, we quickly discovered that a number of the _Broadsword's _crew were still alive and willing to mount a resistance. We put them down, of course, but after reporting the incident, we received word to round up the survivors and hold them prisoner. We weren't sure why until the first R&D team arrived from Project Afterlife."

"Afterlife?" Wilkins thought aloud, gazing off above the captain's head for a moment. "What would they want here? They've already got plenty of subjects from the battlefield."

"It's about this time that I'd normally ask you to show clearance," the captain said, with a slight smile. "But given your position we can probably skip that step." Wilkins nodded, motioned for him to continue. "I'm sure you've already seen what Afterlife can do with the deceased. I guess they wanted to see what would happen if the procedure was attempted on the living. The lead researcher mentioned they had a VIP in custody they were keen to try it out on, but they didn't want to go into it blind. They needed test subjects first."

"Volunteers aren't exactly lining up," Bridges continued, guessing the Major's next question. "And they weren't about to force anyone on our side into the operating chair. And they needed subjects with military training. Put all those requirements into a bucket, and out comes our prisoner situation here."

"This...answers some questions then," Wilkins admitted. Unbeknownst to the captain, the leopard knew full well who the VIP was, and why the tests were being carried out. He had heard that they were studying the affects of the Afterlife procedure on living subjects in a test lab somewhere; he had just never guessed it was aboard the drifting hulk of a disabled Cornerian cruiser.

At that moment, the door to the makeshift office swished open, allowing the sounds of pounding boots and hurried voices to pour in. Wilkins' pilot stood in the threshold, a data disk in one hand and the sheaf of carbon files in the other. The captain's lieutenant was nowhere to be seen.

"Looks like your friends decided to pay a visit after all, sir," the captain commented, holding a finger to his ear com. Another pair of guards went rushing by out in the corridor. "Must be here looking for the beacon I put up."

Wilkins turned from his pilot after accepting the disk, giving the captain a questioning look.

"One of the bits of information we gleaned from the prisoners was the frequency of a Cornerian distress channel. I figured there might be someone aboard your pursuing ship that wouldn't utterly destroy a hulk throwing up such a signal trying to get to you. Lighting it up would force them to dismount and land, give us a fighting chance."

* * *

"Beacon's coming from the brig, I think," Jason's tinny voice said in Fox's ear. "Most of the _Broadsword's _internal systems are fried, though there's enough to cause some static...but I'm pretty sure its the brig."

"Pretty sure?" Fox replied quietly, second in the stack of mercenaries, halting just short of a T-section. Rhade peered around the corner in front, surveying the intersection. "You couldn't be a little more sure of that?"

There was a short pause of empty air as Rhade waved the group forward, staying in place and keeping his weapon trained down the long hall of the intersection. Fox crept forward in a crouch, Sophie directly behind him, with Falco and Miyu bringing up the rear. Their boots made inescapable _clacks _on the metal deck plating, but they otherwise kept quiet.

"'Fraid not Foxie," Jason finally replied. "The beacon's a handheld unit, and the signal's pretty weak. It'd almost be better if we were outside the ship, away from the local static; in here, a rough area's the best I can do."

"Got it," Fox relented, pausing before another intersection and allowing Falco to come forward to scout it out.

"So not the com center anymore then?" Falco asked aloud, hearing the conversation on his own com. He ducked back from the intersection. "Where's the brig?"

"I saw a sign just outside the hanger, pointing down a flight of stairs," Miyu answered after Fox shook his head.

Falco suddenly looked exasperated at the idea of retracing their steps through hostile territory. They hadn't come across any sign of life yet, but the dimly lit, battle scarred corridors created an uneasy sense of impending violence that the mercenaries couldn't quite shake. Scattered around with the aftermath of an external pounding, the _Broadsword's _hallways contained an assortment of infantry level battle remnants: dents in the walls, spent shell casings, and the occasional dried patch of splattered blood.

Rhade continued Miyu's thought, his deep, gravely voice hushed. "We should be able to find another flight somewhere around here; take that and pick up the trail a level down."

"Sounds like a plan," Fox nodded. "Move out then. And stay alert; I don't like how quiet it is given our welcome committee back in the hanger."

"That part's givin' me the creeps," Falco quipped, aiming his shotgun down the corridor and allowing the others to move across the intersection.

Sophie watched him as she passed, carefully gripping her pistol and feeling the comforting pat of her medical bag against her hip. Despite his grumbling, the avian was kneeling as rigidly as a statue, finger on the trigger guard of his weapon. Despite his grumbling, Falco never forgot his task.

Sophie looked around again as they proceeded through the subsequent hallway, noting how the armored mercenaries around her shifted and moved. Fox ran in front of her, his rifle raised and ready to be the first to react if a threat appeared ahead of them. Miyu trailed behind the chestnut canine, her armor rustling as she moved, her face an image of alert wariness. As the lynx caught Sophie's glance back, she offered her a small, strangely reassuring smile.

Compared to those around her, Sophie felt naked without armor. Her cargo jacket, cinched tight around her waist, was rugged enough to look at home in a combat environment, but it offered no protection against an errant slug. However, despite that sense of exposure, and despite the fact that it hadn't been a week since she'd known any of them, those around her couldn't have made her feel more protected. Something about the way they knew their roles and held themselves, tossing each other jokes and silent nods, gave her a sense of confidence in their abilities. It was as though she were back with a squad of Cornerian soldiers during the Lylat War.

Fox gave a little as she ran into him, lost in her own thoughts, the vulpine careful to minimize the noise she made. For her part, Sophie realized immediately what he must have seen to have stopped so quickly, and stifled any noise of surprise or apology.

Fox peered out into the next intersection, spotting his marks down the hallway. The soldiers were facing each other, chatting back and forth about some subject or another. The men carried weapons large enough to classify them as soldiers, but they lacked armor. Just beyond them lay a stairwell, along with what looked like a map of the ship in a case on the wall next to it.

He turned around to face the stack behind him, putting up two fingers, followed by all five, covering one of his eyes. Two of them. Partially blind.

The vulpine pointed at Miyu, next in line behind Sophie, and motioned for her to join him at the front. As she crept forward, Fox noticed Falco waving with agitation, gesturing behind them the way they came. The avian jabbed a finger at his bare ear, then at his boots. Footsteps approaching from behind.

Fox spun back around, into the eyes of an expectant Miyu. He tapped his chest armor and made a sweeping motion to the left with his hand before tapping her shoulder and repeating the motion to the right. She nodded once.

_Boom. _Falco's shotgun barked from behind them, splitting the tense silence apart.

"Go!" Fox shouted, realizing the moment was lost and forgoing any sense of stealth.

He swung out into the intersection, raising his rifle with practiced ease and lining up the guard on the left. The soldiers had just started to turn towards the sudden noise, allowing Fox to catch his man with a multi-round burst from his gun, stitching his unarmored chest.

At the same time, Miyu swung out further, taking an extra step to get a clear shot on her target. The righthand soldier likewise had an extra moment to react, able to snap off a shot from the hip as a burst from her weapon put him down.

The slug grazed the lynx's right arm, just below the shoulder piece of her armor, and ricocheted off the wall behind her. She grunted but didn't falter, standing with barely a misstep and following Fox down the corridor towards the stairwell.

"Come on!" Fox shouted as he ran, checking behind him and seeing Sophie hesitate. He stopped just outside the door to the stairs, allowing Miyu to continue through and clear them. "Sophie, come on!"

The canine medic pushed herself up and obeyed, one hand steadying her shoulder bag, the other gripping her pistol. Falco's shotgun sounded out again, accompanied by the semi-automatic _pops _of Rhade' rifle as they backpedaled into view behind her. As soon as they began down the intersection and broke sight with their pursuers, the pair of mercenaries turned and sprinted, catching up with Sophie just as she and Fox proceeded into the stairwell. Slinging his weapon, Falco grabbed the hatch door behind him, slamming it shut with a shout of exertion.

"Any lock on that thing?" Fox called up from a flight of stairs down.

"Not seeing one," Falco called back, taking a look at the inside of the door. Giving up, he followed the rest of his crew down, taking the steps two at a time. "They'd be crazy to follow us though. Who knows how many men we've got covering that door."

Sophie looked up at him from the first landing, kneeling next to Miyu as she applied a wrap to the lynx's bleeding arm wound. "But we're not leaving anyone behind, are we?" she said with concern as the avian passed the girls.

"That's the plan," Fox answered from the next landing down, catching Rhade's eye and stepping out with him into the lower hallway. The vulpine's direction looked clear down his sights, and the lack of gunfire from Rhade's side was likewise reassuring. He ducked back into the stairwell. "But they don't know that."

"Let's keep moving," Rhade interjected from the lower hallway, gazing at a floor map embedded in the wall. "The brig isn't far."

* * *

"Reinforcements are on their way, Sergeant; we need to hold out until then," Captain Bridges said into his com. "Pin them in the brig after they go in. No need to risk more lives than necessary here." A faint, buzzed affirmative answered through the com's tiny speaker.

"Reinforcements?" Wilkins repeated, striding even with the captain as they turned down another corridor. His pilot and the lieutenant followed, with a quartet of soldiers forming an escort on all sides of them.

"We sent out a distress call at the same time our intruders showed up." Bridges replied, pausing a moment. "A genuine one, that is. We received a response from one of Norwood's frigates saying they were on their way. Said it wouldn't be long."

"And what awaits our intruders in the brig?"

"Besides a bunch of empty cells? The Afterlife squad we received as reinforcements when the researchers came," the captain replied. He saw his superior's odd look and hastened to reassure the leopard. "The Cornerian resistance took more of a toll on my men than I would like to admit. And the Afterlife units have proved to be cheap and efficient." Bridges hesitated. "For the simple jobs, anyway."

"_Simple _jobs, captain?"

"Doesn't get much simpler than 'kill', sir," the officer replied.

"Seems like it would be an easy enough task for one of your conventional squads, captain," the Major quipped.

The captain was silent for a few moments, choosing his words carefully as they continued down another hallway. "I lost a half-dozen men in the hanger to these guys. Two more in the hallways. If I can save one soldier's life by softening them up this way, I'll take that opportunity. Sir."

* * *

The hatch to the brig swung inward with force, clanging against the wall at the same time Falco and Fox burst through. Their sights couldn't find any targets though, and after a few tense seconds, they moved in and allowed the rest of their group to come through. Miyu grabbed the hatch on the way in, closing it behind her with a metallic _thud_.

The brig was larger than most rooms on board a warship, though the ceiling was just as low and slightly claustrophobic as anywhere else. About the size of a small cafeteria, the room had a circular guard's post in the center, with traditional barred cells lining the walls. The bars glowed with a slight blue light, similar to the ghostly magnetic barriers used in hangers and docking bays to hold in the atmosphere. The glow in this case was to make the cells soundproof, adding a high-tech edge to the old world methods of containing prisoners. Why the barrier was activated was unknown though; all of the cells the team could see were empty inside.

The glow also formed largely the only light source for the room, the normal overhead emplacements all shorted out or occasionally flickering. There was little physical damage to the bulkheads and contents of the brig, but it was clear that the extensive damage elsewhere in the _Broadsword _had waves of effect throughout the ship. The far end of the room was enshrouded in darkness, the faint glow of the furthest cells falling short of lighting the wall.

However, while there were no steel girders bursting through the ceiling or jagged metal plates, spent shell casings of multiple calibers littered the floor. As Fox stepped forward, he felt the traction in his boot give way. The vulpine caught himself, noticing the small pool of blood, now smeared on the deck plating beneath him.

"Oh this is good," Falco whispered with sarcastic dread, the darkness of the room bearing down on him. The five mercenaries had spread out a little, proceeding to the desk at the center of the room. "This is just peachy."

"Looks like there was a hell of a fight," Miyu said from behind them, toeing a shell casing. "Maybe some of the crew was alive? There was resistance to Bauker's men?"

"That would explain the distress beacon," Sophie thought aloud, holding her pistol in both hands but drawing little reassurance from it.

"Shh," Fox hushed, holding up a hand. The group came to stop, restoring silence to the room. Moments ticked by as the lack of sound remained, their faint breathing gradually becoming audible as their hearing adjusted.

Fox's ear twitched, and his eyes snapped towards a cell along the left side of the room, nearly the furthest one down. Its contents were hidden from view due to the angle. The sound was dancing at the edge of his senses, a faint buzzing that slowly, gradually resolved itself into the rhythm of severely muffled speech.

Without a word, he sprinted forward towards the dark end of the brig, keeping his rifle up but focusing entirely on the cell. A split second later, his team followed, cursing under their breaths as the vulpine raced ahead. As he neared the cell in question, a light flickered on and off in the blackness, revealing an open hatchway to another room.

"Cover that door," Fox ordered as he reached the cell, knowing from their footfalls that Falco and Rhade were changing direction to take care of it.

After passing so many empty cells, the shock of seeing one occupied was enough to stop the vulpine cold when he reached the source of the faint sound. The fact that the occupant was up against the bars, frantically, silently shouting at the top of his lungs didn't help either.

Seeing Fox appear out of the darkness so suddenly caused the man to stop his barely audible yelling, widening his eyes and sending him back a step. In the sky blue glow, Fox could see the husky's uniform, tattered and worn but clearly that of a naval officer. The husky himself looked faded and weary, as though he hadn't had a proper night's rest in a week. Sophie came running up and stopped next to Fox, the pair of them staring silently at the prisoner as he stared back.

"His eyes," she breathed, drawing Fox's attention to them. The husky's eyes were darting back and forth, bloodshot and crusted with fatigue. His body was tense, as though expecting one of the mercenaries to reach through the bars and try to grab him. "Think he's been interrogated?"

Fox's mind raced as he nodded, putting pieces together. '_But if he's in here, and the beacon's coming from here..._'

"Shit!"

Falco's curse fractured the quiet unease of the room, replacing it with gunfire as he and Rhade unloaded their weapons through the door they were assigned to cover. Before Rhade could close the hatch, a silhouette jumped through, barely visible in the dark, moving faster than Wolf's soldier could react.

A shot from Falco's shotgun put the figure down, its momentum carrying it several meters into the room. The light overhead flickered again, freezing the moment another figure came through the door in a millisecond of eerie stillness. Falco's look of surprise as he was tackled, still cycling his weapon, burned itself into Fox's vision, as did Rhade's calm expression, abandoning the hatch and backpedaling with his weapon raised.

The fractured silence shattered as a stream of the intruders poured through the hatch, apparently oblivious to their comrades' bodies on the ground as the mercenaries opened fire. Falco's shotgun skittered across the floor, thrown free of his grip by the body pinning him down. He swung wildly in the dark, connecting with the figure's head and throwing his weight into the man, breaking free and pushing himself to his feet. A knife flashed in darkness, nicking the avian's cheek and causing the mercenary to roll backwards.

Falco gained his feet again just in time to duck another jab, grabbing for his hip holster as he did so. He rose up again, sidestepping a swipe from his assailant and lifting his revolver in one fluid motion. The heavy calibur slug tore through the man's forehead, putting him on the ground and adding another firearm's retort to the chorus.

Bodies littered the ground, and still they came, nimbly jumping over their fallen comrades only to be gunned down by the firing line formed by Fox, Rhade, and Miyu. The three were spread out, with a few meters of space between them, the muzzle flashes from their rifles nearly constant. If it occurred to any of them that they had yet to take return fire, they put it out of their mind.

One figure swung wide, circling around another who bore the brunt of Rhade's rifle and getting the drop on the wolf. The lupine turned just in time to see the glint of a knife raised above him before it stabbed downward into his unarmored neck. He grunted and fell with the man on top of him, his opponent raising the knife again before several shots from Sophie's pistol impacted the assailant's chest. The man slumped to the side, landing beside a small pool of blood now leaking from Rhade's armor.

Suddenly, everything was silent. An errant shell casing tinkered along the floor as the room settled. The scent of gunpowder was everywhere. Across from the rest of his crew, Falco dashed forward into the darkness, followed shortly by a heave of exertion and the solid metal clang of a hatch door slamming shut.

"W-what the hell was that?" Miyu cried, unable to immediately calm her nerves.

"We need some lights in here," Falco said, tripping over a body as he made his way back to the relatively illuminated area around the glowing, occupied cell.

"Check the desk," Sophie suggested, her tone of voice the sort of calm that only comes about when one's emotions are overloaded. Her hands were both busy, one pressed firmly against the gash in Rhade's neck, the other groping frantically in her medical bag. She began muttering a procedure to herself, the picture of a battlefield medic as she reached back in her education to pull out the right treatment.

Falco leaned over the desk as he made his way back to the group, spotting the faintest outline of an emergency kit in the dimmest of blue-tinted light from the cells. He grabbed the kit's handle, slamming it on the desk and popping it open. Inside, next to a number of medical supplies and emergency rations, he spotted what he needed. A directional flashlight, and pair of heavy duty glowsticks.

The avian rolled one of the sticks to Sophie on the ground, not trusting a toss in the faint illumination, and cracked the other, spilling a pale yellow light into his immediate area. Holding the stick aloft, he thumbed the flashlight as well, casting aside the darkness as he swept the beam of light across the carnage.

Miyu stopped the rolling glowstick with her boot, kneeling next to Sophie and Rhade and cracking the light source. She held it up for the medic to do her work, helping the chestnut canine unbuckle and remove Rhade's armor along with Fox. As Miyu grasped the last strap and tugged it free though, she glanced up, seeing what Falco was lighting up, and realizing why the normally loud avian was so quiet.

A dozen bodies of mixed races lay on the ground between the desk and the far hatch, all dressed in black jumpsuits, and all with outstretched arms, reaching for knives that lay on the deck plating nearby. Their bodies were riddled with holes, the result of three assault rifles working full time to put them down. It was the scene of a gruesome slaughter, and yet there something absent amidst the bodies. Not a single gun lay among the fallen soldiers. There was a knife for every being, but firearms were completely absent. However, that wasn't the part that drew the team's concern.

Miyu's mouth fell agape, looking down at Rhade as Sophie removed his chest armor, revealing the torn and stained undershirt beneath. The knife wound was long and jagged, slicing through the upper layers of the flesh of his ribcage. With a practiced touch, Sophie traced the gash with her red-stained paws, grabbing the bandage she finally found in her bag and pushing it against the profusely bleeding stem of the wound at the wolf's neck. The pool of blood beneath Rhade had grown, and while his face registered only frustrated pain, his eyes betrayed a brief moment of fear as he felt the thick, dampness of the vital fluid spreading.

The lynx then looked back up, at the seen of violence before her. That was it. That's what was missing.

"Where's...where's the blood?" she stammered. Hey eyes hungered for what she knew should be there, but as Falco swept the flashlight from body to body, not a drop showed up. "Guys?"

Fox stared wide eyed as he stood, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Their bullet wounds were dry. Even the body nearest the hatch, the first one through, taken down by Falco's shotgun. Dry.

The frantic waving of the prisoner caught Fox's attention again, and with the help of the excess light from Miyu's glowstick, the vulpine spotted the sound barrier switch on the wall next to the cell. He toggled the controls, leaving a stain of Rhade's blood from his fingers.

"You have to get out of here, _now_!" the prisoner shouted hoarsely, grabbing the bars with both hands and pushing his face against them.

Fox ignored the fact that the prisoner, practically nose to nose with him, was screaming his words. "What the hell is going on here?" he shouted back, looking the man in the eye. "Who are you?"

"Hartford," the husky answered, calming himself a little. "Alex Hartford. But you guys-."

"Need to leave?" Fox repeated, cocking his head. "Look, Alex, we don't have time for this. Were you a crew member? How do we get you out?"

Hartford backed away from the bars a little, as if they had suddenly made him uncomfortable. His eyes darted towards the spread of bodies before returning to Fox. "I'll be honest; I'd rather stay in here."

The vulpine blinked, uncomprehending. His mouth parted to speak, but a faint rustle caught his attention. Judging by the sharp intakes around him, it caught everyone else's attention as well.

Falco's flashlight focused on one of the bodies, towards the middle of the littering of corpses. The mix of low illumination lights in the room and the increasing vibrations in Falco's arm made the shadows around the body shift and stutter. The angles of the shadows were all off, understandable considering the many sources of light, but the way they moved, the way they coordinated into something almost resembling movement, caught everyone's breath in their throats.

Despite the modern, civilized world those on the Star Fox team had all been born into, their early, formative years remained a tradition passed down from generations before history. Those years of implicit and self-realizing education were altered with each successive generation to account for advances in technology and shifts in surroundings, but a few tenants remained. Food and family are good, and to be hoarded and treasured. Pain and darkness are bad, and to be avoided. Some things in life move and have motives of their own, others are lifeless and require the input of a sentient being. Some things felt good, but required moderation and control, while others were to be freely enjoyed.

However, there was no truth more universal, no concept of knowledge so understood and trusted as the idea that life, though wonderful in its complexity, would inevitably cease. And regardless of what one believed happened afterward, the physical vessel of the deceased would remain, stiff and still.

Falco's flashlight revealed the source of the noise. And like a thunderous slap to the face of every being with a warm, beating heart, the man moved.

They all moved. Pushing themselves up like sleep deprived children, they rose to their feet, some with difficulty, all with determination. Those with difficulty stuttered and shook, as though they couldn't realize why their bodies were fighting their apparent resurrection. All the while they never spoke a word, or breathed a sigh, or uttered any verbal sign that they were aware of their supposedly fatal bullet wounds. Boot leather creaked, knife handles were gripped, and still they rose. Of the twelve who had first attacked the mercenaries, eleven rose, leaving only one of their number, Falco's assailant, on the floor.

Fox felt his nerves give way under the impossibility of what he was seeing. The rifle hung limp in his hands, and he could feel the weapon slipping towards the ground. His lips moved, mouthing words he couldn't find the will to speak. He was as silent as his teammates, rising to their feet if they were kneeling, but otherwise unable to move. Other than the rustle of those regaining their feet, the brig was silent.

"Afterlife," Hartford whispered, backing further away from the bars. His eyes were wide, not due to fear of the unknown, but rather due to the fear caused by knowing exactly what was happening. It wasn't the first time he had borne witness to the Project's subjects.

Falco pumped his shotgun, the ejected shell tinkling on the metal deck.

He took aim without waiting for an explanation, lining the closest body up in his sights as the man drew himself to his full height. The avian's finger had just touched the trigger when the shorting ceiling light flickered again. Out of the corner of his eye, Falco saw the man he had shot earlier with his revolver, inanimate on the ground, even as the rest of his comrades stood. A gaping hole was still glaring out of his forehead.

The mercenary shifted his shotgun up and fired.

His target's face disappeared in a cloud of smoke and metal, sending the man to the ground for good.

"And _stay_ down!"

* * *

**A/N:**

Surprise! Four parter :)

As always, I never seem to have enough time for this story, so I apologize for the late updates. I know it probably started sounding hollow a long time ago, but I am sorry. I remember reading fanfics that just stopped abruptly because the author was lazy about updates, or quit the story altogether, and how frustrated I got. But no worries, I fully intend to finish this story up. Might take awhile, but we will reach a (hopefully) sound conclusion. Promise.

After I finish the Good Major plotline (next chapter), I'll include a recap in the following update for those readers who had to suffer the long wait times between chapters.

**chaos Leader**: I know, I know; I've had that thought myself. But we're getting there. Trust me. Give me one more chapter and all should be made clear. Thanks for the review!

**RedBay: **I'm not sure I should comment on all of those hunches, but I do appreciate how much thought you've given to my story. I will say that some number of them are threads that I will be picking up in the future, while another good number are little asides that weren't meant to really go anywhere. You're extremely observant though, and I salute you for that :) Thanks for the review!

**Emile**: Thanks Emile! Glad to hear you're enjoying the story. And best of luck with reworking your story as well! If you ever want a review, send me a PM and let me know! It's the least I could do for someone who read my fic.

That should do it for now. The next chapter is about 75% done. Until then, if you'd like to let me know how my story is (whether good or bad), please feel free to leave a review or send a PM. Every bit of feedback helps! Some of my veteran reviewers know how much the right critiques can help move a story to a better place; I certainly wouldn't be this far into the story without their help.

-Redd


	35. Chapter 35: The Good Major Pt IV

**XXXV: **The Good Major Pt IV

Captain Bridges and Major Wilkins arrived at the bridge, exiting the corridor into the makeshift command center of the joint research and salvage mission aboard the derelict _Broadsword_.

Like an operational bridge, the crew the officers found were concentrating hard on their work, maintaining systems and monitoring readouts. However, unlike an operational bridge, all of their consoles were portable, set up in a rough semicircle on the floor of the bridge, within the semicircle created by the actual, dormant bridge stations. Wires crisscrossed the room, connecting the various portable pieces of electronics and laid down with little regard for cleanliness or efficiency; most of Bauker's men assumed the salvage operation they were running wouldn't take more than a week or two, so there was little need for such time consuming luxuries.

"Sir!" One of the men shouted, looking up from a radar readout. "We've got a rough contact on sensors. Looks like a frigate on course with us, though it's transponder is scrambled, probably due to the cloud."

"That would be Norwood's ship," Captain Bridges acknowledged, striding over to the man's temporary station. "The captain sent a message responding to our distress call. Can we establish a link?"

"A limited one, sir," the man replied, typing a command into his console. "The cloud's not going to help at all."

"Set it up," the captain commanded.

The bridge's viewport, long dormant since the _Broadsword's _demise, flickered painfully to life. A hiss of static coursed through the damaged sound system for a few moments before a blurry image began to fade into view. The picture resolved itself into a frigate's bridge, cramped compared to that of a cruiser like the one Bauker's men occupied, but spacious enough to fit all of the necessary stations. A being sat in the command chair, reptilian in appearance as the silhouette gradually became clear.

The species of the frigate's captain didn't worry either of Bauker's officers; most of Warlord Norwood's fleet consisted of the remnants of Andross' navy, and reptilian species made up a fair percentage of those ships' crews. What worried the officers was the way this particular reptile held himself.

The captain wore a gray trench coat over what appeared to be some manner of combat armor. The coat was worn and tattered, complete with tears and scars from battle, purposefully left with no effort to cover them up. His boots were scuffed and dirty, his armor scratched and faded. Far from Norwood's normally strict dress code for his forces, this lizard looked more like a ground pounding mercenary than a captain of a naval vessel.

Major Wilkins found the way the frigate captain was grinning unsettling.

"You called?" the lizard said, his voice quick and furtive, as if he were explaining the particulars of disarming a time bomb to someone without much time left. "Or distressed, I suppose. You called in distress. Distress called, if you prefer."

Wilkins stared blankly at the lizard in the trench coat for a moment before turning to Bridges, seeing a similar reaction. Bridges' eyebrow was cocked, and his mouth was agape in some expression straddling disbelief and concern. Wilkins looked back at the lizard.

"You're not with Norwood, are you?"

The lizard cackled, slapping the armrests of his chair and leaning forward. When he did though, his expression suddenly slackened and his voice dropped. His bass was conveyed through the jury rigged speakers of the _Broadsword_'s bridge. The lapel of the lizard's coat shifted, revealing the emblem of a bloody wolf's paw on the breastplate of the armor beneath.

"Was it the coat?"

"Sir, the frigate's launching landing craft and taking up a defensive position around the light carrier!" an officer shouted in alarm from his console.

"Transponder reads the _Vitahly_," another voice chimed in. "Database says its one of O'Donnell's frigates!"

"Recall all troops to the hanger!" Bridges yelled in reply, his confused expression quickly giving way to fear.

"What about the brig forces-"

"_All_ of them!" Bridges screamed, turning to another technician nearby. "Lock down the brig remotely. We'll deal with _them_ later." He breathed out, trying to regain his calm but failing at least partially. "Tell the men to prepare for powered armor. Wolf's boys don't mess around."

He stormed grumbling from the bridge, Wilkins in close pursuit. "What the hell did you bring down on us, Major?"

* * *

"And _stay _down!"

The crack of the shotgun snapped his friends back to action, and the room erupted once more in violence and noise. The mercenaries coalesced, forming a barrier in front of Rhade, still on his back with Sophie kneeling over him.

Her pistol barked along with the rifles of those around her, but their bullets seemed to have no effect on their adversaries. She jettisoned her clip, struggling to load another in with shaking hands. The canine looked up and saw Fox unload the last of his magazine into the torso of one of the black suited men; she saw the bullets tear straight through. And yet the man stood there and took it without flinching, as if waiting for the tell tale _click _of the vulpine's empty clip.

When the sound came amidst the backdrop of gun retorts and bullets pinging off the back wall, the man launching himself forward, thrusting his head straight into the waiting rifle butt of Fox's weapon. Fox grunted, reversing his grip to swing at the stunned man again. The heavy duty material of the weapon's stock struck with force, dropping him to the floor.

Just as the vulpine was realizing what Falco had moments before the fight re-engaged, another assailant's bloodied shoulder drove into him, knocking Fox to the ground. A knife flashed as it arced downward, deflected just in time by the body of Fox's rifle. As the gun was sent flying across the deck plating, Fox made a grab for the man's arm, trying to disarm his opponent. Still reeling from the tackle, however, he grasped open air, and the man raised his blade again.

An image of Rhade's bloody wound flashed through Fox's mind.

Accompanied by the background _boom _of Falco's shotgun, Miyu dove at Fox's assailant, screaming as she tackled the man. Aided by the weight of her armor, the lighter lynx managed to free her friend from his attacker, rolling over and over with the man until they came to stop a few meters away. Miyu found herself on top, and wasted no time drawing her pistol and pressing it to the man's forehead. He stared up at the girl, completely ignoring the weapon about to end him. The muzzle flashed, and the man's flailing arms and legs relaxed and became still.

She heard the rapid _thuds _of bullets impacting something behind her, and she turned just in time to see another attacker stumble and fall next to her victim. Without thought, the lynx took aim at the head and fired again, ending another threat.

Fox quickly regained his feet, shaking off whatever ill effects he had suffered from his assault, and rejoined the fight. He tossed a sparing glance at Miyu, getting a firm nod in return and turning his attention back to Falco and the rest of his team.

Just in time to watch Falco take a knife to the shoulder.

Falco rolled with the blow, falling down beside Rhade but managing to keep a grip on his primed shotgun. He brought the weapon around and unloaded it into the attacker's face, taking the immediate threat down but leaving him defenseless. His left shoulder was practically spouting blood, and he couldn't feel his left arm. And there was no way he could pump the shotgun with one hand.

Just then he felt his revolver slip from his holster, and heard the familiar _click _of the hammer above the cacophony around him. He glanced over and saw Rhade's hand shaking, struggling to take aim with the handgun at the woman about to strike the fallen mercenaries.

The revolver's recoil nearly freed the weapon from Rhade's weakened grip, but the bullet shot true, plowing up through the chin of the attacker and out the top of her head. She slumped to her knees before pitching forward on top of Falco, her knife clattering to the floor.

Fox's renewed assault kept the remaining mysterious assailants at bay, and they shifted their attention towards him and Miyu, deemed the highest threats remaining in the brig gallery.

Working in tandem, and having a few meters of space to work with, the two remaining mercenaries with a rifle and pistol between them made short work of their assailants. Only a pair of them were left standing when Fox's magazine ran dry.

Fox tossed aside his empty rifle in favor of his pistol, but a swing from one of the jumpsuited enemies sent it flying across the floor. Fox ducked the follow up knife stab, yanking his own knife free from his boot as he did so. He then rolled to the side, dodging another attack and rising to a fighter's crouch, knife held in reverse grip in front of him.

His assailant advanced, swinging wildly with his own blade, but failing to stick the nimble fox. The mercenary twisted to the side, letting his opponent extend himself and scoring a deep cut on the man's arm as he passed. As was the case throughout the fight though, there was no cry of pain or frustration. Fox tried not to think about it as he found himself directly behind the man, and, without hesitation, plunged his knife into the back of his opponent's neck.

The man immediately halted all movement, and in the dim light Fox managed to just make out what looked like a thin strand of wires under the skin and neck fur, now cut apart. With a meaty _thud, _he fell to the ground, just moments after Miyu's assailant, who sported a fresh bullet wound to his face.

The brig settled.

Fox breathed out as his adrenaline began to fade, leaving behind an icy coldness that chilled him to the bone. A sudden pain flashed from his arm, where a long, shallow gash suddenly made itself known. He couldn't tear his eyes away from his last victim, laying face down at his feet. Two sets of wounds now marred the man's body, and yet his expression didn't look any different than it had before. There was no visible change between life and death, though those terms were suddenly uncomfortable for the fox, considering what he had just seen.

A moan of frustration brought him back to his downed teammates, being tended to by a serious and focused Sophie.

"Everyone alright?" Fox asked, wincing as soon as the words left his mouth.

Rhade looked pale, the blandness of his skin jarring enough to show through his exposed fur. Sophie had managed to get a compress onto his neck wound, but it was rapidly becoming saturated with blood. Rhade's fur was damp and matted; his shirt torn and bloodied. If Fox's mind wasn't already reeling from the battle, he would have found comparing the solid, unflappable Rhade he had known to the weakened, possibly dying man on the ground impossible.

Falco reached up and tore the knife out of his own shoulder, looking at it for a moment before tossing it aside in disgust. He accepted a cloth from Sophie's medical bag, but waved away any further help, gesturing at Rhade instead. The avian mumbled curses to himself as he pressed the cloth with his good arm against the wound in his bad.

Miyu knelt down next to them, but before she could offer any help, Falco pushed his shotgun into her hand, managing to put a thin smile on his lips.

"Be a dear and reload that, would you?" he asked, seeking to take his mind away from the pain the only way he knew how.

Miyu stared at him a moment and smirked, taking the weapon and slipping the shells he pulled from his belt in. "Never thought I'd see the day when Falco needed someone to handle his weapon for him."

Falco's smile turned into a pained grin and he looked at Fox, only to see that he had moved to the jail cell housing Hartford.

Fox stared at the husky through the bars, the canine staring back with the same tired, dreadful eyes as before. Fox's gaze came off sharp as he dropped the sympathetic feelings of before. He knew that this Cornerian officer knew something about what had just happened. What had nearly cost the lives of his teammates.

"What the hell was that?" Fox said calmly and evenly, though with aggression churning just under the surface.

Hartford paused, an equally heavy question weighing his thoughts down. "Who are you?"

Fox blinked, sharpening his gaze. "Maybe you don't understand the situation here," he said, stepping as close to the bars as he could get. "Which, frankly, is impressive, given your front row seat to what just happened. Now what the hell was that?"

Hartford seemed to gain a hint of resilience at Fox's reaction, pushing his argument. "I don't know who you are. And after..." he trailed off, looking down as he reminisced on something. After a moment of thought, the tired husky apparently gave up, shaking his head. "Maybe I _don't_ understand the situation. But there's no way I'm helping you until I know who you are."

Falco growled from the floor, trading his bloodied wrap for another offered by Sophie. "Is this joker serious?"

"We don't have time..." Miyu began.

"It's okay," Sophie intervened. She stood, creating a triangle between herself, Fox, and Hartford. Her field fatigues were stained heavily with blood, her hands nearly drenched. She wiped them off on her jacket, turning towards the officer. "I'm Sophie Arkanian, sir, combat medic. I was attached to a Cornerian base on Fortuna. Serial number..."

Hartford's features softened as she spoke, rattling off a string of numbers and characters, and his expression slowly contorted in confusion as he looked back at Fox. He clearly wasn't convinced. "You're...Cornerians?"

"Some of us," Fox answered, unable to drop a sense of frustration. He made a quick decision to drop the charade that they belonged under Wolf O'Donnell's banner though, reasoning a Cornerian officer wouldn't respond well to it. "We're a mercenary team, and we're here chasing one of Warlord Bauker's lieutenants."

"Bauker?" Hartford repeated, his eyes narrowing. "Bauker."

"Yes," Sophie continued. "He took refuge on this ship. Just before we came aboard we detected a distress beacon from somewhere around the brig using Cornerian emergency frequencies. Was that you, sir?"

Hartford shook his head. "No; I've been in here for..." He trailed off again, as if he wasn't quite sure himself.

Miyu rolled her eyes despite as Sophie continued.

"Is there anyone else aboard the ship who could have-"

"No," Hartford's definitive answer came, surprisingly sharp.

"Are you sure, sir?"

"More sure than I ever want to be in my life, Ms. Arkanian," he replied, his voice conveying a strange distance.

Falco listened to the conversation unfold from the floor, fidgeting at the officer's shifting tone of speech. He looked at Fox with an unimpressed expression, tilting his head towards the man behind the bars.

"Okay, that's us Mr. Hartford," Fox interrupted, silencing further talk between the two Cornerian soldiers. He was getting impatient. "Now who're you?"

Hartford looked at Fox. Sophie's allegience to Corneria had convinced him that these rescuers were at the very least not with Bauker's men. "The switchboard for the cell bars is under the desk behind you. Let me out and I'll tell you what you want to know."

"We really can't babysit another with someone critically wounded, buddy," Falco began to protest, discounting himself despite his left arm hanging limp at his side.

"What I know includes the pass codes to every lock this ship has," Hartford retorted. "Now, as the former Captain of this vessel, I want you to let me out."

* * *

"Katt...you there?"

Slippy's voice buzzed through the console of Katt's modified Invader III, apparently speaking to nobody in particular. Within his portrait on the viewport, the toad was peering closer at the screen, as if it would help him see more of the interior of the empty cabin.

"K-katt? We've got friendlies incoming..." Slippy's voice went on, falling on absent ears as he continued to describe the situation in case somebody was within ear shot.

Out the light freighter's open hatch, near the wall of the _Broadsword's _hanger, a pile of scrap and metal lay imploded under a massive fallen crossbeam. The pile constituted the remains of a utility shuttle, crushed beneath the impossible weight of the heavy metal beam, splitting it open like a piece of fruit. The wreck had a chance to settle over the past month or so since its destruction from on high, giving it the appearance, if placed in the right light, of a small shipwreck on the beach of in an ancient sea.

Katt surfaced in the midst of the wreck, stretching her back and thrusting her arms towards the gaping hole in the ceiling above her. She sighed, folding her arms and resting her chin on a fist, gazing down at her handy work.

A collection of mechanical devices and stripped electrical components lay on the deck at her feet, in a little cleared out area she had made for herself after diving into the wreck. The fallen beam had broken the shuttle open straight down to the ground, opening all of its internal components and splitting apart secure housings. The carnage was pretty complete, but for the scavenging feline, the wreck presented a bounty of valuable engine parts and console displays, gear boxes and avionics. The mechanical components were second nature to her, and she figured she would be able to enlist Jason or Slippy's help in figuring out how the electronics worked.

The only thing to figure out now was how to get her treasure trove of parts back to _her _shuttle. She looked up and around, trying to spot Jason around the hanger without having to scurry out of her little pit.

"Jason?" she called, her voice echoing through the docking bay. "Jason, hon, you there?"

"Yep!" his voice echoed back from somewhere on the other side of Katt's shuttle, hidden from view. "What's up?"

Katt was about to respond when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something drifting through the blackness of space, through the faded blue of the magnetic containment field. She glanced over, spotting a pair of shuttles gliding silently, growing rapidly in size as they neared the hanger. They were angular and angry in shape, looking very much like the assault shuttle Sophie had piloted into the _Broadsword's _hanger. The leveled off as Katt watched, making their final approach and pushing through the magcon field into the docking bay.

The roar of the shuttles' engines snapped to life as though turned on by a switch. They flared, tilting upward and canceling their forward momentum towards the middle of the docking bay, just before the fallen beam Fox and Falco had used for cover during their breaching action earlier. The cacophony of the engines in full burn assaulted Katt's ears, and she instinctively yipped and ducked, hiding in her little cleared out pit. She poked her back head up, careful to keep her eyes just above the line of her cover.

The shuttles landed on struts, their engines powering down as their hatches opened. One disgorged a squad of a half-dozen armed troopers, clad in black and red armor, muzzles, ears and various racial features poking out from beneath their ballistic helmets. They immediately formed up in two rows of three, one trooper in each row sporting a chevron on the shoulder plate of their armor.

The other shuttle's hatch opened wider than the first, parting to reveal a suit of power armor standing menacingly in the doorway. As soon as the hatch finished cycling, the suit jumped the half meter or so to the deck, landing with a loud metallic _clang_ as another appeared in his place. A third appeared behind the second, before the string of soldiers was completed by a lizard in a gray trench coat, leaping nimbly to the ground and trotting to meet up with the rest of them.

Katt watched as the lizard, the commander by the way he acted, strode past his men and out of sight beyond her shuttle.

On the other side, Jason watched the approaching lizard with a mix of confusion and trepidation. The sudden roar of the shuttles had sent him very nearly through the roof of the hanger, and sent the rifle in his hands, scavenged from one of Bauker's dead guards, flipping very actually a good twenty meters away. He had been rounding up the weapons and gear from the men Fox and company had taken down, inspecting them and determining which, if any, were worth keeping. Most of the rifles were generic, low to mid grade military stock, as were the pistols, but one or two of the firearms had some unique modifications made by their deceased owners, intriguing Star Fox's impromptu armorer.

The lizard stopped at conversational distance, watching the frozen vulpine with a curious look. Jason stared back, a primitive animal caught in a spotlight and utterly unable to react in any way.

There was a beat of silence.

"Am I disturbing something?" Leon Powalski asked the sheepish fox. "Er, more so than usual, I suppose."

Jason finally recognized Leon's face, though if he realized it was a friendly one, he didn't show it. The vulpine shook his head slowly.

"Well good," Leon replied, clapping his hands once. "The little toad told me you'd be holding down the fort. I hope McCloud and friends left some action for us." Leon paused, looking up at the damaged hanger lights for a moment. "McCloud and friends...that'd be a good name for your little team, eh?" He looked at Jason. "The cuddliness of a sitcom, the _sting _of a crack merc squad."

When Jason didn't respond, Leon frowned, shrugging. "Could use some work I guess. But think about it, eh? Now, since you're here, playing with your little toys, you must either have a guard on the door over there, or you locked it." He caught a glimpse of Jason's satchel of electronic devices. "Probably smarter to just lock it. Good call. Kindly undo that now?"

Jason nodded, wordless now not because of surprise, but at Leon's bizarre patterns of speech. The thought to ask the lizard what he was doing here didn't even come to mind.

Leon smiled, sending a shiver down the fox's spine. "Many thanks. And do tell McCloud that we're making our grand entrance to the little shindig he's stirred up. Don't want to be hit with any errant streamers or party favors." He turned back to his soldiers, shifting his voice to a cool professional tone as though nothing had been said during the last minute. "C'mon, Gamma; let's see what we can find aboard this junker."

* * *

"No, not undead. Nothing of the sort."

"Then what?" Falco whispered, pain still evident in his voice as they crept along the hallway.

"Afterlife's subjects are machines; there's nothing supernatural about them," Hartford replied quietly. "Just dead soldiers reacting to...something. I don't know. A battery, I think."

"A battery?" Fox asked, wincing under the weight on his shoulders. He remembered the wires he saw running up his last attacker's neck. "Why a battery?"

"Attached to a computer. It sends impulses to the body's brain and nervous system. If you catch a body quick enough after it dies, there's still a bit of a mental pulse that you can use to keep the primitive functions alive. You just have to write a computer program to send pulses along the nerves to make the body do what you want it do." Hartford paused, adjusting the unfamiliar com in his ear. "It's more complicated than that, but-"

"That's messed up, man," Falco quipped through gritted teeth. "I mean, you're resurrecting these guys to be hosts for a _program_. Damn."

"Who told you, Captain?"

"Wing Commander Rashik," Hartford replied, thinking back. "We were all held together when Bauker's men first came. He told me everything about what was happening with Admiral Gage and the Seventh Fleet. I didn't believe him at first, but then others agreed with him, corroborating his stories. It was like they were all in on something I didn't know."

They continued forward a few more steps in silence. "Finding out that Admiral Gage had betrayed us to Bauker was..." he trailed off, lapsing back into a fog of introspection.

"Did you hear that?"

The column stopped at Miyu's hushed words over the com. The back of the lynx could be seen a good fifteen meters ahead of the rest of them down the corridor, playing scout for the rest of the group of mercenaries, weighted down with casualties.

Falco was walking on his own with his shotgun slung on his back, useless now that his left arm was in an improvised sling. His right hand now gripped the handle of his revolver, held in front of him pointed at the floor.

Rhade, however, was barely conscious. Through some miraculous power of will the wolf was able to stand upright and put his boots on the floor, though he had to be supported almost entirely by someone else as they progressed. Fox was taking his turn, supporting the big lupine under his shoulder as Sophie trailed behind the pair, checking the readouts on a small, hand held instrument connected to nodes on Rhade's neck with a cable. She had expressed concern at the amount of blood Rhade had lost in the brig.

Bringing up the rear was Hartford, borrowing Rhade's com to hear Miyu's warning and kneeling when the rest of them did. He held Fox's pistol in two hands, careful to keep an eye out behind the group as they retraced their steps back to the hanger.

The Major wasn't going to go anywhere, and with the _Great Fox _and Bill and Rhena flying cover, even if any reinforcements did come for Bauker's men, they would be intercepted before landing. Given the static situation, Fox reasoned that they had time to find their way back to Jason and Katt to deposit their wounded. His major worry was that they themselves would be intercepted en route, but so far that fear hadn't materialized.

In fact, despite killing a good number of Bauker's guards on their way in, the mercenaries hadn't seen any of his men since leaving the brig, something that tugged at Fox's battle senses as distinctly odd.

Now, however, he could hear the faint sounds of battle, coming from the direction of the hanger they were heading towards. The vulpine wasn't sure at first, but as he listened, he distinctly heard the sound of heavy small arms fire, accompanied by the occasional _thud _of a muffled explosion.

Just in time to answer the question before it was asked, Jason's absent voice suddenly sounded over the com.

"Um, guys?" he said, sounding unsure of himself. "We've got friendlies on the deck. Not uh...not sure where they came from. Just left the docking bay."

That would explain where all of Bauker's men went. Fox gestured at Hartford, motioning to take his place under Rhade's shoulder. The husky complied, sliding his handgun into the band around his waist and wrapping the wolf's arm around him. Now free of his burden, Fox reached behind him and took hold of his assault rifle, ratcheting the bolt and jogging to the front of the column with Miyu.

"Any thing else?" Fox asked, tapping Miyu on the shoulder to let her know he was with her.

"They looked like some of Wolf's boys," Jason answered, sounding a surprised as Fox was. "Yeah, no idea where they came from. I think that Leon fella was with 'em though."

"Roger," Fox replied, hearing Falco's growl of irritation over the com. "We're bringing Falco and Rhade back to the hanger, we'll link up with them there."

"Go on ahead," Falco said, waving Fox and Miyu on. "This place is a ghost town with Wolf's soldiers drawing all that attention." When Fox looked back and hesitated, Falco gestured more urgently, cocking the hammer of his revolver. "Seriously, you guys could actually do some good. We'll catch up."

Fox hesitated only a moment longer before nodding, turning and dashing off down the hallway with Miyu in close pursuit. He felt a little guilty leaving the four of them behind, especially given his promise to Bill about Sophie, but he knew that Falco had a point. Not to mention they weren't completely defenseless, and certainly not with the avian still walking with a working gun hand.

The sounds of conflict neared, growing louder and more urgent as he ran. Corridor after corridor passed, devoid of bodies, reinforcing his theory that all of Bauker's occupying soldiers were busy repelling Leon's assault force. The vulpine couldn't tell yet which side was winning, or which side was which, but if he and Miyu could help tip the battle their way, taking down Major Wilkins would be infinitely easier. Shouts of pain and alarm began separating themselves from the mass of gun retorts and explosions. They were getting closer.

And then suddenly, they stumbled upon it.

Fox rounded a corner to find himself down the hall from a squad of Bauker's soldiers, themselves busy shooting down a number of perpendicular side corridors. One of them was taking cover behind a bulkhead, only to turn towards the newcomers to the fight at that moment. The soldier's eyes widened, and he barely managed to shout a word of alarm to his comrades before Fox opened fire from the hip, still surprised to have encountered the enemy so soon.

Fox skidded to a stop, throwing himself in reverse even as his bullets lanced out at Bauker's men. Unlike the skirmishers from before, these soldiers wore armor, similar in strength and weight to the mercenary's own, though with the standard color scheme of Bauker's forces. His bullets ricocheted wide, and the few he managed to land collided with solid protection, leaving the target with some nasty bruises but no other damage.

Miyu grabbed him as Fox came back around the corner, pulling him to safety as a number of angry projectiles came looking for him. They heard shouted directions from around the corner, and soon the attacks coming their way slowed to a steady, constant trickle. They were being pinned.

It was just as he realized this that he felt, rather than heard, a familiar sound.

"Armor!" Bauker's men shouted in a panic, before being drowned out by the thunderclap weapons of Leon's hulking, power armored soldiers.

The pulsing rhythm of their cannons felt like a second heartbeat, thumping in Fox's chest with the pressure waves of their discharges. Bauker's men forgot all about the mercenaries, entirely concerned now with finding a way to mount a defense against the walking tanks.

Fox peered around the corner, wincing with every _thump _of a cannon, watching the soldiers as a pair of them stepped out into the intersection. Their arms were cocked, ready to throw what looked like hand grenades with a florescent blue hue. The slightly ovular objects were made of a translucent material, revealing a sparking core within.

One of the soldiers was abruptly consumed in a flash of light and red mist, skewered through with an energy blast from one of the cannons. His grenade fell at his feet. The other soldier managed to hurl his payload, diving back into cover as soon as it left his hands. Fox brought his weapon around and took aim, mindful of the soldier's armor, and dropped him with a burst of shots, stitching the man's upper plating and scoring a pair of hits, one slug puncturing the armor above the heart, another finding naked flesh around his neck.

Then the grenades blew, one right after the other. The one visible on the floor of the intersection erupted in a storm of blue lightning, forming a dome of electricity that disabled the light panel on the ceiling directly above, but did little else. Further down the perpendicular hallway, the second grenade detonated, accompanied by the painful screech of grinding gears and scraping metal plating.

Fox rushed to the intersection with Miyu right behind him, pressing himself against the wall and peering around the corner.

One of Wolf's powered armor suits was kneeling halfway down the hall, unmoving. All of its external lights were dark. Beside it on the floor was the second grenade, it's sparking core now dark as well. The suit's wearer must have saw the EMP grenades coming while he was charging forward, and managed to get into a stable position before the blast caught him and shut him down.

Fox stared at the suit for a moment, noting how curiously _harmless _it looked in its powered down state.

At that moment, one of Bauker's soldiers appeared at the far end of the corridor, on the other side of the suit, having apparently made a flanking run. He saw Fox and Miyu at the intersection, looked at the helpless suit of armor, and abruptly charged for it. Careful to crouch and keep the hunk of metal between himself and the mercenaries, he dodged their bullets and slid up to the suit itself.

Fox and Miyu, for their part, couldn't bring themselves to simply unload down the corridor. The metal plating of the powered down suit would have deflected any harm away from the wearer stranded inside, but it still felt _wrong _somehow to shoot at it. They had to settle for carefully placed potshots, whenever an enemy shoulder or limb poked from around the suit.

Fox was still trying to figure out what Bauker's soldier was doing when the man slid to a stop, raised his rifle to the suit's neck, and fired.

The crack of the rifle made it all clear, and Fox tried to push the thought of the suit wearer's frozen agony out of his thoughts. Another pair of guns at the far end of the hallway made it easy to take his mind off it, and he and Miyu dove for cover once more.

As they ducked back around the intersection though, Fox heard a voice that touched some instinct of his, forcing a shiver down his spine.

"Fancy meeting you here, McCloud."

Fox turned away from the hot corridor and came nearly face to face with Leon, leading a trio of soldiers dressed almost identically to himself and Miyu. The lizard had a rifle held tactically in his hands, the tails of his trench coat billowing to a rest around his legs. Fox settled the spike in blood pressure at his voice, and gestured around the corner.

"Could say the same, Leon," he replied as the lizard leaned past him, glancing down the hostile hallway. "We tried to save-"

"His fault," Leon cut him off, leaning back. "Shouldn't have gotten separated from his escort. Poor soldiering, really. No worries, the Power Corps' all volunteers anyway. Daring bunch. Hungry for battle. Hungry in general, really. Big fellas. Really pack it away come mess time."

Fox eyed the lizard. "We've got wounded coming this way shortly," he continued, gesturing back the way he and Miyu came. "Headed for the hanger for evac."

"We'll keep an eye out for your lost little kittens," Leon complied, motioning for his men to start returning fire down the corridor. He glanced at Miyu. "Er, _pups,_ I suppose. You tend to run more canines in your crew if I remember correctly. I usually do."

"Thanks," Fox replied, replacing the clip in his rifle with another from his belt. "What're you doing out here anyway?"

"Running errands for the big man and got distress called. Thought we'd pay a visit. Far more to it than that really, but you know the drill. Nudge nudge, cloak and dagger and all that." He paused, waiting for Fox to respond in some way. When the vulpine didn't, he shrugged. "Right, run along then. So much to shoot, so little time."

Fox's eyes lingered on the lizard, cocked into that unique mix of confusion and concern that always seemed to follow a conversation with him. He ratcheted his rifle, loading a round from his new clip, and trotted on, glancing behind him to make sure Miyu was on her way too.

She stopped in front of Leon, her expression mirroring Fox's.

"What _are _you?" she asked, incredulous at the lizard's behavior and unable to hold her tongue.

Leon just smiled a wide, disturbing smile. "Fair question." He then stepped around her, moving with his men further down the corridor and leaving the lynx more confused than before.

* * *

"Sir, we're leaving?"

"Yes," Major Wilkins replied, grimly drawing and checking his pistol. His stride was quick but firm, purposeful but unhurried. His side bag was packed with the files from Warlord Siona, and the disk copy he had made. "If they chased us here, they're after me or something I have. The only way to give Bridges' men here a fighting chance is if I make a run for it."

The Major's pilot considered that. Surrounded by four guards as they walked, he felt pretty safe at the moment, and the prospect of hoping back into a heavily damaged transport wasn't exactly appealing to him. Not to mention the fact that the CDF fighters the pursuers had come in with were more than capable of catching up to and shooting them down. The Invader II's Captain Bridges had tossed at them certainly hadn't been able to do any damage.

"You can stay if you like," the Major said after a moment of quiet walking, turning to his pilot. "I can operate the _Courier _myself. But I don't think you'll be any better off here."

A pair of gunshots from up ahead silenced them, and the group abruptly came to a stop.

"Check it," Wilkins said quietly to the lead pair of guards.

They obeyed, stooping to a crouch and jogging forward with their weapons raised. They approached the side corridor where the shots had come from cautiously, one of them pushing his back against the wall, the other crouching behind him. They waited for a moment, listening for any further sound before making the turn, both of them sweeping up and into the side corridor in tandem, rifle butts to their shoulders and necks canted to gaze down their iron sights.

Wilkins expected to hear gunfire erupt, and was already contemplating another route to his transport when he heard the _swish _of something disturbingly close on the deck plating behind him. He instinctively turned to see it, only to be greeted with the sound of two rapid _pops_ from a handgun, a pair of holes appearing in the heads of his rear guards as they crumpled to the ground.

The Major stumbled backward towards the way he had been heading, his feet moving away from danger without his brain telling them. He hit the deck hard on his back, raising his head just in time to catch a glimpse of his ambusher. Time slowed as he saw the smoke still rising from her pistol's barrel.

The lynx stood a few meters off, raising her handgun for another shot, directly at the Major. The bizarre time warp was what he always imagined would happen right before he died, but instead of his imminent demise triggering a series of flashbacks, he just began noticing tiny details of the world around him. She wore the red and black armor of Wolf O'Donnell's forces, if he remembered their colors correctly, though lacking the helmet, and strangely, boots or shoes of any kind. Her bare, spotted feet answered his question about what had made that noise. A reddened bandage was wrapped around her bicep. But those deep blue eyes, and that indifferent scowl; the Major could have sworn he had seen her somewhere before.

His pilot fell between them in slow motion, hands up not in an attempt to spare the Major's life, but merely in an unfortunate impulse decision to dive in that particular direction to escape the lynx's line of fire. His entire body tensed and shuddered once as she squeezed the trigger, absorbing the slug meant for Wilkins.

Suddenly the air was crackling with bullets soaring over the Major's head from somewhere behind him, mostly missing the lynx. One or two skidded off her chest armor, driving her back into a nearby side corridor for cover. Suddenly he could breathe again.

"Major, come on!" one of his forward guards shouted.

Wilkins scrambled to his feet and ran towards them, away from the lynx in Wolf's armor. He tried to duck and stay out of their suppressing fire while simultaneously sprinting for his lift, leaving his gait awkward and ungainly.

He looked up as he got within ten meters of them, only to see the guards undergo a barrage from the side corridor they had been investigating. One fell immediately, while the other turned to face the new threat. Wilkins paused for a split second, watching the soldier trade fire with the unseen assailant before a series of shots walked up her armor, ending with a slug that drilled straight through her forehead.

Seeing the last of his guards fall, he turned and dashed down a different hallway, away from the ambush. The Major heard a pair of boots following, giving chase. There were two now. It was the lynx he was worried more about though. Without making any noise while she ran, he had no way of knowing when she would be able to take a shot.

A slug pinged off the wall next to him, and he ducked down yet another corridor, doing his best to continue in the same general direction he was originally headed before the ambush. Captain Bridges and his men would be of no help now, and his battered transport seemed like the only way out. It wasn't far away, but he had no way of knowing if there were any alternate routes.

The leopard's tail flipped wildly as he ran, pumping his arms as hard as he could. Every time a shot rang out, he took the next turn, keeping enough of his wits about him to break line of sight as quickly as possible.

He heard both of his pursuers yelling, though they were far enough apart from each other to let him know that they were using coms. He tried to make conscious decisions in his mad dash to keep from getting between them at all, but it was only a matter of time before they closed the net.

Then it happened. Wilkins had just spotted the door to the docking berth. As he entered the last intersection a fox appeared, dressed in the same armor as the lynx and running at full tilt from the crossing hallway. The vulpine tried to bring his rifle up, but he didn't have enough time. In the painfully slow moment before they collided, Wilkins recognized his green eyes and orange furred face.

Fox McCloud. From Yohan Depot. This was the mercenary who escaped with those Cornerian pilots. That lynx had been with them too. How? Did Siona set him up?

With a bone-rattling _thwack _the two bodies collided, sending both sprawling to the deck. Unarmored, the Major took the brunt of the blow, but his momentum had carried him to where he wanted to go as he slid up against the door to his berth. The mercenary's rifle skittered to a stop next to him as the sheaf of papers in his pack flew everywhere.

His eyes lay on the weapon for a second as his ears stopped ringing, and an image of him standing and ending the mercenary himself flashed through his mind.

A slug shattering on the heavy door above him ended that idea though, as the lynx began firing her pistol from the far end of the hallway he had just run down. A fragment sliced his cheek, and he reached up from the ground to slap the door controls. He could hear Fox regaining his senses close by, and wasted no time pushing himself through the open door, and shutting it behind him.

The loud curse he heard as he locked it gave him no satisfaction. His run was only just beginning.

* * *

"Wilkins scarpered," Jason's com portrait said. "Fox just checked in, said he made it back to the _Courier. _Sounded pretty winded; must've been a hell of a chase."

"Got it," Bill replied, flipping a switch to disengage his fighter's safety. Power from the ship's reactor flowed into its offensive conduits, and a pair of gauges on his dashboard quickly began filling a bright green.

The hound couldn't help but let his lips curl into a smile as he saw Sophie in the background of Jason's portrait on his HUD, working intently on someone lying on the floor of Katt's shuttle. It looked like Rhade, but with the portrait's tiny size and poor resolution, there was no way he could tell for sure. He spent little time wondering anyway. Fox had just checked in, and Falco was far too stubborn to die. It had to be Rhade. And more importantly, he had proof that Sophie was okay, and that the mission was winding down.

"Rhena, you hear that?" he asked, easing his CDF fighter out of its wide turn. The pair of snubfighters had been flying a lazy cycle between the _Great Fox _and the _Broadsword_, widening their flight path to include the _Vitahly _once it came in scope. They had escorted Leon's assault shuttles in, just in case Bauker's men had any more surprises waiting them. Leon's arrival in the frigate had been an interesting turn of events, to say the least; Rhena and Bill had just been preparing for a futile screening action against the mysterious warship when Slippy called them off and informed them of its allegiance.

Bill gazed out at the red and black ship as he swept past it, angling back towards the _Broadsword_. Knowing they were in hostile territory, he couldn't deny the sense of safety he derived from the additional firepower it brought.

A single _click _sounded over the com, indicating Rhena's affirmative. The wolf had expressed frustration at her continuing language condition, and quickly resorted to an effective one-click, two-click com code.

They swept down over the derelict cruiser, searching for the flare of the transport disengaging itself. Bill knew Fox was down there watching the berth door, and didn't want to risk any stray cannon fire mistakenly spacing his friend. He also didn't know what sort of defenses the transport might have, and wanted to keep moving just in case.

Rhena dropped back off his wing after their first pass, putting some distance between them so they could always keep guns on the transport. They didn't have to wait long, as his sensor board abruptly lit up with a new signature.

"Fox is getting the _Broadsword_'s captain to give him the codes for the locked berth room," Jason's portrait said, appearing on Bill's HUD again. "Until they give it a once over, consider Wilkins aboard that transport."

Bill flashed a thumbs up to his HUD camera. He pulled back on the stick, putting his fighter into a gentle loop back towards the departing _Courier_. The transport was still visibly leaking fluid as it detached from the _Broadsword's _hull, lighting its engines and making its way from the derelict cruiser, trailing a thin, clouded stream of vapor. It moved painfully slow for the hound, who easily swooped in on its tail.

He chopped back on the throttle, gliding to a perch just aft of the transport's engine block and matching the ship's speed. His crosshairs fell into place over a gash in the transport's rear hull as they proceeded away from the grouping of warships. On his radar, he could see Rhena doing the same, maintaining a safe distance.

"Major, please turn and set a course for the _Vitahly," _he said, opening a channel to the transport. When he got static in respond for several moments, he keyed his microphone, attempting the plea again. "Major Wilkins, you're worth just as much dead as alive. Make it easier for both of us and set a course for the _Vitahly_."

"Bill," Slippy said through the HUD. "I just pinged him. Major Wilkins is targeting a point of space really far away through the cloud. The coordinates s-seam meaningless, but they could be a nav waypoint."

"Roger Slip," Bill replied, dropping his crosshairs again, this time to the glowing engine cones. "If he looks like he's gonna make a run for it, I'll cut him off."

The trio of ships drifted on, moving at perhaps a fifth of the speed the CDF fighters were capable of. They proceeded along their trajectory for about half a minute with nothing but static over the com before Bill got fed up. He was about to disable the transport's engines when a new portrait appeared on his HUD, unfolding and revealing the face of a worn, tired Cornerian officer.

"Sergeant Grey," the Major said, his tone something approaching respect. "Better you than those mercenaries I suppose. Rather a fellow man of duty than-"

"Don't go calling yourself a soldier, Major," Bill interrupted, injecting a bit of venom into his pronunciation. The faces of his former squadron flashed through his mind, one by one. "Soldiers don't betray their oath. They don't turn on their own." He knew the Major wouldn't hear them, but the alien words from Rhena's private channel were a welcome vote of agreement.

The Major allowed Bill his words, his expression unimpressed. "The way I was taught, a soldier fights for the betterment of his people. Of his nation. Even if his nation has trouble realizing it."

"What are you talking about?" Bill asked only half rhetorically. "Bauker's alliance is a threat to Lylat and the peace we've achieved since Andross. Trying to pick up where he left off will only cost the system more blood."

Wilkins' chuckle was quiet and hollow, distinctly eerie to the hound's ears. "Do you honestly believe that we want anything to do with that mad ape? Or where he _left off_?" His smile wasn't any more comforting. "Propaganda is an ugly thing, Flight Sergeant. Don't make the mistake of thinking Corneria is somehow above it."

"It doesn't matter," Bill insisted, adjusting his flight path to stay on the _Courier_'s backside. "Propaganda or not, _I_ know that you're still a traitor. No Cornerian officer would attempt to murder fellow-"

"And I deserve to die for being willing to kill for my beliefs?" Wilkins interrupted. He let the silence hang for a moment. "Why not you? How many of Bauker's pilots died as a result of you tailing me? How many crewmen aboard the _Cipher_? Not to mention the soldiers your mercenary friends killed on the _Broadsword_. Why are they justified?"

"Because those soldiers and crew are serving the remnants of a dictator's fleet-"

"Says Corneria!" Wilkins nearly shouted as if proving a point. "Says the nation that controls Lylat under the guise of benevolence! What claim does Corneria have to meddle in the lives of Lylat's citizens? The largest military? The most political power? Their end goal is no different than Andross' was; they're merely conquering with an open hand rather than a closed fist."

"Bauker's alliance is _not_ the second coming of Andross," Wilkins continued. "All we want is the freedom for every Lylatian to determine their own destiny; the freedom Andross promised but never intended to follow through on."

"You would plunge Lylat into anarchy then?" Bill retorted, his expression beginning to twist into a frustrated snarl. "Strip away every bit of security and safety Corneria provides, just so you can reset civilization? We aren't trying to conquer Lylat. Only save it from your _master's _plans. From further destruction!"

Wilkins chuckled again. "_We_. You say it as though they would ever consider you one of their own again."

Bill bit back a response, the image of his name on a bounty notice still fresh in his memory. He breathed out, letting his frayed nerves relax and rebuild themselves. Here he was, crosshairs centered over the man who betrayed him and his friends, who was at least partially responsible for murdering most of his squadron, and yet he couldn't bring himself to deny the Major's argument. Bill had allowed himself to vilify Bauker so much that he had forgotten one of the core rules of information warfare. Never assume your enemy has simple motives.

Good and evil are abstract concepts, and Bill's mind was beginning to have trouble coping with the suddenly blurring lines. His fervor to kill Wilkins was beginning to fade, replaced instead by a cold, calculated realization.

He shook his head, gripping his joystick.

"Corneria is not perfect," he said slowly, choosing his words carefully. "But it has good intentions for Lylat at heart."

"So do we," Wilkins replied evenly. "What makes your intentions better than ours?"

Bill was silent. However, before his mind began to sink too far into a mire of thought, reflecting on the Major's words, Rhena's voice pierced through the haze, bringing him back.

The wolf's words were utterly indecipherable, but their intention was not. Their frustrated tones and syllables sounded as clear as though she were speaking standard Lylatian. And her face, no longer enclosed in the gold portrait of a private channel, was contorted to match. Her lips curled in a snarl, her orange and red hair disheveled from action seen since arriving in Sector Z, she was the picture of angst. And there was only one way to vent her passion.

Rhena's CDF fighter burst forward with sudden acceleration, her guns blazing. Green darts of light peppered the backside of the Major's transport, poking holes in the already gravely damaged outer hull. Her fighter lacked any larger ordinance to deal with the tougher armor of a military transport, but the bombardment was already having an affect, as some of the holes began to spout flame and smoke.

"Rhena, wait!" Bill cried, though his hand was rigid on the stick. He couldn't bring himself to do anything to stop her, though he wasn't sure what he _could_ do to halt the wolf's rampage.

A burst of fire punctured the damaged armor around the _Courier_'s engine block, shaking the transport with a mighty shudder as its propulsion died.

"I know I did right by Lylat," Major Wilkins said, his portrait filling with static as the transport began to lose power. The leopard's bloodied face was calm. "Could you...same...?"

"Kul'eh! _Kul'eh!"_ Rhena shrieked, just as a final burst from her cannons struck home.

The transport detonated in a brilliant fireball, quickly snuffed by the relative void of Sector Z's cloud. Shrapnel flew in all directions, and what was left of the ship's chassis was consumed by a rapidly expanding cloud of reactor runoff, mingling with the gasses of the sector.

Bill instinctively tilted his fighter and dove, ducking out of danger and away from the small debris cloud. His shields were buffeted with tiny metal shards, draining some power but doing no serious damage.

His eyes were focused on nothing in the distance, and for a few moments he flew in a straight path, unwavering and unwilling to reprimand Rhena's actions. In his heart, he knew she did what had to be done, but there was something about the way the Major spoke his last words. A certain calmness which Bill could only imagine came with the certainty he claimed to have. And if he was so certain...

The hound shook his head, clearing his mind. _'No,' _he though, pulling up on the stick and leveling his fighter out. _'No, this is right. He may have been convinced, but I...I know what I'm doing is right. That's all I need.'_

He glanced at his radar, watching for any sign of an engine flare or life support system to indicate an escape pod had been launched. When he saw none, he keyed his com, saying the words he had been hoping to say for a very long time.

"Major Wilkins is dead," Bill said, the words intended for Slippy, though broadcast on an open channel. "The good Major is gone."

* * *

**A/N:**

Reviews!

AndrossKenobi: I'm glad to hear the foreshadowing worked out okay; I was a little worried it might spoil the surprise. Thanks for the review!

chaos Leader: Hopefully the zombusiness worked out okay. My goal was never to have Project Afterlife be "zombies" per say, though that would be the first reaction to anyone seeing them. I'm personally not a fan of paranormal fiction for the most part, so though they may be zombie-like, I wanted to make sure they were entirely based in science. Or, fictional "science", at least :P Thanks for the review!

RedBay: Thanks for the kind words, RedBay. I decided to put off the recap until I finish up the Good Major subplot; that way it doesn't come in the middle of the action. I threw in a little explanation as to what's going on in this chapter, but if it's not enough, no worries; I'm planning on a better explanation next chapter. But quickly, to answer your question about Rhena, I wanted to portray the "warp" process as very alien and unpolished; it is an almost entirely unknown science, so frankly, weird stuff happens. In Fox's case, it was a surreal sort of vision/dream thing. In Rhena's case, it was some sort of damage to the speech center of her brain. More on that to come :)

TheFrustrated: Awesome! Makes me smile to know the build up worked! And you hit the nail on the head with what I was going for with the current level of explanation of Project Afterlife. Glad to hear you're enjoying the story; thanks for the review!

pkmnfan11: Thanks! I always enjoy writing battle scenes; they're my favorite part of any sci-fi or military style story.

JasonR: Much appreciated Jason; thanks for the review!

Not much else to say down here; thanks again to everyone who read and reviewed.

And as always, please don't hesitate to use your endowed power of reviewing as a reader; if I'm messing up somewhere, let me know! If I'm doing good somewhere, let me know! If I'm all around 'meh,' let me know that too! Any improvement I've made in my writing over the years is thanks solely to reviewers who've picked up on my shortcomings; you guys made this story what it is. Except for the abysmal 5 and 1/2 year run time. That...that one's all me. Sorry about that :/

-Redd


	36. Chapter 36: Compass

**XXXVI: **Compass

A/N: Hey guys, just a quick note up top. If you're looking for a recap of the fic so far (it's been a bit of a winding road), scroll to the very bottom of the page.

* * *

"He was a good man," Bauker said solemnly, standing over the desk of his office. "His efforts will be missed."

"My men also found the wreckage of the _Cipher _near the jumpgate," Warlord Norwood continued, his image taking up the entirety of the wall mounted com screen. "Message pods found in the wreck indicate that the ships were flying Wolf O'Donnell's colors. A light carrier and a squadron of fighters."

"O'Donnell?" Bauker questioned, shaking remorse for Major Wilkins from his mind. "I thought Admiral Gage took him out at Fortuna's moon."

"Perhaps," Norwood nodded, pursing his rotund muzzle. "Perhaps not. It _is_ possible that this was just a surviving splinter command. The fact that the carrier made it through the warpgate is disturbing, however."

"Indeed," Bauker admitted, "Though the possibility that it could have been accidental as they were chasing Wilkins can't be discounted. What of the _Broadsword_?"

"Completely empty," the retriever replied. "My soldiers couldn't find a single living being, though plenty of evidence exists to suggest there was a fight."

"I see," the cougar said, averting his gaze for a moment. The loss of the Major by himself was a noteworthy setback to Bauker's intelligence gathering abilities; combined with the loss of a frigate and a mixed company of marines and scientists, it wasn't an insignificant blow. "Have we heard any word from Ypson?"

Norwood shook his head, though with a strange bit of triumph seeping into his voice. "No. We've found the remains of his flagship, but Ypson's been missing in action since his fleet's skirmish with the Cornerian Fifth. We're beginning to believe High Admiral Markiss' claim to have him and his crew in custody is true, though we're waiting on Siona's report to make sure." He cleared his throat. "In the meantime, I've taken the surviving portions of Ypson's fleet into my command."

Bauker nodded. The ships lost during Ypson's battle with the Cornerian Fifth Fleet numbered not even ten percent of the alliance's assets. Still, combined with the latest news surrounding Major Wilkins, it painted a bleak picture. This was by far the largest set back his alliance had encountered since its formation after the Lylat War; was this a sign of things to come?

The cougar silently chastised himself, regaining his thoughts. Of course not. No cause worth fighting for has ever been fought for without blood being spilled. And this was a cause truly worth fighting for. His scientists reported that they were making progress with Peppy Hare's interrogation; the lessons learned from the experiments performed aboard the _Broadsword _were yielding results.

"Post the names of the dead on the neural net," Bauker commanded after taking a moment to gather his words. "But leave out the Major. List him as M.I.A."

Norwood dipped his head in a half bow; probably a sarcastic gesture, Bauker reasoned, given Norwood's dislike for orders. But it was acknowledgment none the less.

"And tell Siona we'll double her fee for any information on Wolf O'Donnell's remaining forces. We may have to make our move soon, and I'd rather not have them running around behind our backs."

* * *

The halls of the _Great Fox _felt like home to her. Their worn, dingy surfaces had somehow found in her a certain charm. The dents in the deck plates had become familiar; her feet avoided them almost without thought. The occasionally choppy _thrum _of the engines had become a mother's lullaby, comforting in some ways, mere white noise in others.

Falco's music blaring from his quarters. Katt's frustrated grumblings from the engine bay. Bill and Sophie's sugar sweet conversations punctuated with far too many "dear"s and "babe"s. They were the steady breathing of the ship, letting the lynx know it was still alive inside. Even now, when the engines were shut down and the mechanical aspects of the ship were silent, the muffled mutterings of Rhena's bizarre language from the lounge at night, or the impenetrable babble between Slippy and Jason from the shuttle bay as they debated some technology or another, let her know there was still a heart beating.

The _Great Fox_'s engines were shut down because it was back in one of the _Lone Wolf_'s massive docking bays, undergoing largely cosmetic repairs from the battle in Sector Z a week earlier. Where the _Lone Wolf _was, Miyu no longer knew; she doubted Fox even knew at this point. They had rendezvoused with Wolf O'Donnell's flagship on the outskirts of Sector Y, but after that, the Star Fox team was kept in the dark as to where they were going next.

It had taken a week to navigate back to Sector Y from the wreck of the _Broadsword_; a direct route would have been much quicker, but given the stretch of Warlord territory the _Great Fox _would have had to cover, it would have been far too dangerous, even with Wolf's frigate _Vitahly _escorting them the whole way. Instead, Fox and the _Vitahly_'s captain had agreed upon taking a course that led them out and around the Lylat System's outer orbits. Traveling through nearly deep space had its own risks, but the outer reaches contained no valuable resources to exploit, rendering slim the chances of running into any Warlord or Cornerian patrols.

Miyu rounded a corner and continued down another of the _Great Fox_'s corridors.

The sailors aboard the _Vitahly _had kept to themselves for most of the trip. And since Leon Powalski had stayed behind on the _Broadsword _with the frigate's detachment of troops – Miyu shuddered when she remembered how the lizard had grinned when he mentioned something about _questioning _Bauker's surviving men – the crew of the _Great Fox _were left with little official business to attend to.

Almost immediately, they had started peppering the sole Cornerian survivor of the _Broadsword_, Captain Alex Hartford, with questions about the events surrounding his ship. The husky was reluctant to talk about them at first, but after a reminder of his promise to Fox, he began to explain.

Following the battle between Bauker and the Cornerian Seventh Fleet in Sector Z, almost two months ago, the _CNS Broadsword _had been apparently forgotten about. Hartford mentioned how he thought it odd that no Cornerian rescue attempt was made, as was standard procedure when a ship went missing. Warships were expensive constructions, after all, and their crew even more valuable. The idea that the Cornerian Navy would simply forget about a cruiser and its crew seemed unfathomable.

Then Hartford had learned about Admiral Gage's betrayal.

There had been a fighter pilot, Wing Commander Rashik, stationed aboard the _Broadsword _during the battle. His snubfighter had been severely damaged during the skirmish, and had just landed aboard the cruiser for repairs when the _Broadsword _was sent on its charge after a pair of Bauker's retreating frigates. The cruiser and its escort had successfully taken down one of the frigates, and were close to destroying the second when their prey began acting erratically. The frigate, unknown to Hartford at the time, was about to use the Sector Z warpgate. The activation blast from the gate utterly destroyed the _Broadsword's _escort, and severely damaged and disabled the cruiser itself, leaving it to drift in the all encompassing gas vapors of the Sector.

Hartford recalled how he, Rashik, and the score or so of crew who survived the impact of the gate's blast had gathered together in the following days, and listened to the Wing Commander's explanation.

Rashik told them everything he knew, from Gage's alliance with Warlord Bauker, to his theory that all of those who suspected the treachery had been assigned to the _Broadsword _on purpose, to make one convenient vehicle to sacrifice. The Cornerian High Command would get the illusion that Bauker and Gage are legitimately at war, and Admiral Gage would remove most of those who might give his deception away.

Hartford hadn't believed the pilot at first, but then almost half of the surviving crew had spoken up, agreeing with Rashik.

Miyu remembered how Hartford had paused at this point in the story, surrounded by the Star Fox team in the lounge. The husky was quiet for almost a minute, obviously intending to continue, but taking the time to gather his thoughts.

Rashik had also explained Project Afterlife.

The pilot never said how he came to know about the Project. Or how he had managed to obtain the knowledge without being killed for it, though it had appeared that part had finally caught up with him. Hartford suspected he had been part of the conspiracy for long enough to learn of the research behind the Project, but had removed himself after he had learned the truth. His public status as a Wing Commander would ensure Rashik's immunity to a quiet assassination by the Bauker sympathizers in the Seventh Fleet, providing he didn't leak the information to anyone.

Rashik explained how the Project was a continuation of one of Andross' many experiments, its records quietly removed from the mad scientist's databanks by the future Warlord Bauker just before Venom fell to Corneria's alliance at the conclusion of the Lylat War. The results of Andross' bioweapon research were made startlingly clear during the war, as the Star Fox team could attest to firsthand, but this particular Project had never made it to the front lines. For lack of time, Andross had never been in a hurry to finish it.

The goal of the Project was to ensure that the resources spent on training and supporting conventional soldiers were not entirely wasted upon their demise. Early research into the subject had been focused on how some coma patients retained operation of necessary life functions, like breathing, without being conscious. Provided sufficient nutrients, artificially supplied to the comatose patient, certain cases could continue "living" as such nearly indefinitely. Taking it a step further, research was done on patients which had been physically dead for a limited time before being revived into a comatose state by doctors.

It had been long assumed that most of these patients, save the ones that inexplicably regained their faculties at some point, had lost all semblance of intelligence or sentience. Andross' initial research, and Bauker's continued experimentation yielded the fact that this was not entirely true. With the right stimulation the body, and the brain controlling it, could be utilized as it once had, a tool of sentient intelligence. However, with independent brain activity lost upon death, another input for control was required. Something to replace the living "spirit", for lack of a better term, that once resided inside the body.

The research employed hundreds of biologists, doctors, and computer scientists working nonstop. The mapping of the brain, already well underway by civilian scientists in universities across Lylat, was completed for the sake of the Project's purposes. The deceased body became the shell, a biological machine. The inert brain became the control panel. And a computer chip became the new "intelligence."

Impulses sent from the chip were routed to the proper muscles by the brain's built-in neuro-pathways. Provided the body and brain were still relatively intact, the subject could perform any number of relatively simple tasks. Bauker's scientists had literally found a way to make recently dead walk, thanks to technology.

A quirk was uncovered as research continued. Those subjects with physical training – those who had acquired "muscle memory" in an action – still retained the aptitude in how their neuro-pathways were laid out. Their brains were streamlined for the particular activity. This was most prominent in the bodies of soldiers.

While the sheer number of mental processes required for aiming a ranged weapon were impossible to simulate, the developed computer control could still make use of their hand-to-hand martial skills. With a little more research, simple melee weapons could be utilized.

Hartford had gotten quiet again after that. He admitted that a good amount of the information he had just given had come his own observations, watching technicians care for the Afterlife squad deployed on the _Broadsword_, the same one the Star Fox team had been ambushed by and subsequently taken down.

The husky explained how when Bauker's salvage team first boarded the _Broadsword_, the Cornerians had fought back. They were overwhelmed, however, and imprisoned in their own ship's brig. Soon after, the Afterlife squad and a group of Bauker's scientists had arrived. The surviving Cornerians began to slowly disappear after that, taken from their cells one by one and never seen again. Hartford had assumed that his crew were being taken for interrogation, which may have very well been the case, but one of the scientists had let slip their true reason for being there.

"Live subjects," Hartford had said with understated weight to his words. "They wanted to test the process on live subjects."

Navigating the _Great Fox, _Miyu found the flight of stairs she was looking for and ducked into the well. The lynx took the steps one at a time, hearing the clang of her boots on every metal plank.

Hartford had no idea what the results of those experiments on the _Broadsword _were. He assumed they were failures. The husky didn't speak any more about the subject after that, and the Star Fox team gathered around him in the lounge didn't press him any further. The idea of a computer controlling a deceased body was disturbing enough, but the idea that a living, breathing person would be subjected to the same treatment was too much to think about. A foreign voice in your head, commanding your body to act against your will.

Miyu shuddered as she left the stairwell, proceeding towards the hanger door. Someone else's thoughts, intermingled with your own. Only Andross would conceive of a project like that.

The lynx listened as she neared the _Great Fox_'s hanger door. Quiet clangs and the occasional muttered curse filtered into her pointed ears, accompanied by low volume rock music. Found him.

She entered a hanger largely emptied since their hunt for Major Wilkins came to a close. The bulky Invader I fighter they had captured had been transferred to the _Lone Wolf_'s hanger, just outside the mercenary vessel. Rhade's Wolfen had been similarly moved following the wolf's internment in the _Lone Wolf_'s medical ward. Finally, the remainder of Rhena's CDF fighter, essentially the ejected cockpit, had been stripped apart and kept as scrap avionics for the team's other snubfighters.

The pair of remaining CDF fighters occupied the spaces closest to the hanger ramp, leading down to the _Lone Wolf's _docking bay. Star Fox's three Arwings were lined up wall to wall, closer to the door Miyu had just come through. It was beneath one of these red and black fighters that the lynx caught sight of who she had been searching for.

"Little late to be up n' about," Fox said, his voice echoing slightly in the open hanger. He slid out from underneath his Arwing, careful to avoid snagging himself on the open hull panel he was working in. He paused while still on his back, bracing himself up with his elbows.

"Could say the same," Miyu retorted, approaching the grease stained vulpine and crossing her arms. His white t-shirt was nearly black with the stuff. "Doing a little late night tinkering?"

"Something like that," Fox replied, stressing the words a little as he pushed himself off the deck. He stood with a smile, a sight that Miyu was keenly aware she was getting used to. She could still remember the negativity of her first reaction to it, way back when she had been rescued by him, though she was having trouble remembering the reason for the negative emotions in the first place. Now his grin was like any other friendly expression, the good vibes rubbing off on her a little. "Slippy's little contraption overloaded a few systems back in Sector Z," he continued, patting the nose of his Arwing fondly. "Just getting around to taking care of that."

"You seem happy enough though," she stated as he reached inside the open cockpit, tabbing off the music system.

"Why wouldn't I be?" Fox replied, his smile widening to a grin. "Got a paycheck in my pocket and my crew back in one piece; plus, we made some progress against Bauker. Not a bad contract." When Miyu's expression refused to brighten past mildly amused, he let his grin drop, taking his tone down with it. "So what's up?" he asked, crossing his own arms and leaning back against his fighter. "Still getting used to Peppy's room?"

Miyu bit her lip, leaning back a little and cocking her hips. She wasn't expecting to bring it up so quickly. "Something like that," she stalled, unintentionally using Fox's own words. The lynx had practiced what she was going to say to him just minutes ago, pacing the very room they were talking about. All the while, Peppy's photo with the broken frame, the one with Fox's father, had stared at her, interrupting her thoughts every few moments. The long disappeared text on the back of it screamed at her, even as she tried to put her thoughts in order. Whatever speech she had planned, however, evaporated now quicker than a drop of water on Titania.

After the team got a message earlier that day from Warlord Siona, saying that her men had picked up Peppy's trail on Hrakness Station, Miyu had determined that now was as good a time as any to get the hare's message off her chest. The fact that the trail disappeared into Warlord territory for some reason only heightened the need.

Fox watched her reaction, his expression softening with concern. "Miyu, what's up?"

"It's about your father," she blurted out, almost immediately regretting the suddenness of it as she watched Fox's concerned face harden into a confused state of something approaching insult. Were she of a softer mind, she may have found her hand over her mouth in surprise.

"My...father?" he asked, eyes narrowing. Any malice he gave off was unintentional, but the fact that Miyu apparently sought him out to tell him about his father, whom he rarely, if ever, talked about was concerning. What could she possibly have to say about him? What could she possibly know that she would seek him out now, at this hour? "What about him?"

Miyu exhaled, her mind catching up to her mouth. It took a moment to get the two to coordinate again, but having utterly shattered the ice helped. A little.

"I...I found a note," she stammered, suddenly unable to meet his emerald eyes. They glared at her, begging for more information one moment and threatening to bore through her the next.

"Miyu," Fox said with restraint, taking a step forward. Gone were the friendly notes from before. "What note?"

"In Peppy's room, right after Shoana Freeport. I was..." Miyu replied, looking up at him. Almost immediately she had to drop her gaze again. Here it comes. "I was looking at some of his pictures one night and I...accidentally dropped one."

Fox cocked his head, the first word coming out almost as an accusation. "Why were you looking through his-"

"I-I don't know," Miyu admitted, recalling the odd sense of heaviness in Peppy's room that night. She was already in deep; too late to back out now. "I just couldn't get to sleep, so I was looking around and one of his picture frames fell on the floor. That's not important." She resisted the blood rising in her veins. Now was not the time to get mad at Fox, of all people; not while she was trying to tell him something, anyway.

Fox fumed but remained quiet.

Miyu breathed out. "On the back of the picture, Peppy wrote a message to you, talking about himself and your father. Talking about how he put something he wanted you know in ROB's memory." The young lynx closed her eyes, furrowing her brow in confusion. "The message disappeared after I read it, and I know how that must..."

She stopped, looking at Fox. The vulpine was watching her with a mix of anger and bewilderment, like a irritated psychiatrist not quite prepared for a patient's ramblings. But he kept his silence, implicitly beckoning for her to continue.

"Fox, what do you know about the Angels?"

* * *

"Slippy, we need the ship's logs."

Slippy froze mid keystroke, looking up from his console. Fox had just barged onto the bridge, followed closely by a worried looking Miyu. The toad was unaccustomed to seeing the lynx experiencing such an emotion, and it rubbed off on him a little.

"C-can it wait a sec?" Slippy asked, looking quickly back and forth between the two. "I was just about to finish up today's en-"

"Sorry buddy," Fox interrupted, moving to his command chair and sitting down. He unfolded the tiny keyboard tucked under one of the armrests. "Right now."

"Um, okay then," Slippy agreed quietly as a notice appeared on his screen, informing him that he had been booted from the ship's log by another log in.

The toad began shutting down the portion of the console he was utilizing. He could guess that whatever Fox was searching for in the logs would be sensitive, especially if Miyu was acting the way she was. Wishing to give his friend privacy, Slippy was just about to stand to leave when he heard a whisper from behind him.

"No, stay," Linka said, putting a hand on Slippy's, flat on the console. The toad glanced behind him, seeing the coyote staring up at the bridge's main viewport where Fox was navigating through the ship's logs. "Could be interesting."

Slippy hesitated, but stayed where he was, now aware of the fact that Fox and Miyu didn't seem to mind, or notice, him sticking around.

"ROB would have uploaded anything valuable in his memory to the _Great Fox _before he went down," Fox said, still harboring a bit of an edge in his voice. "Day minus one?"

Miyu nodded, unwilling to say any more. On the way to the bridge, Miyu had explained everything she could remember reading in Peppy's note, following Fox a step behind as the vulpine made his way through the _Great Fox_. During the trip up from the hanger he only spoke in terse, quick questions, listening intently to her answers but saying nothing else. While his expression was neutral, there was a certain hardness to his lines; a certain rigidness to his features.

Fox, for his part, couldn't help a bit of his anger from seeping through in his words and posture. How could Miyu have known about something like this for so long and not told him? Sure, they had been well occupied for a good while since Shoana Freeport, but the vulpine's ire remained.

As he began navigating the logs, however, the mercenary captain realized that his negative feelings towards Miyu were quickly fading into a sense of eagerness about what Peppy could have left for him. The revelation that his father and the hare were members of the infamous Angels was shocking enough; what else could there possibly be?

Fox brought up a search bar, typing in the proper date. To his surprise, the various menus and logs departed from the viewport as soon as he keyed it in, leaving the screen blank. The window was still opaque, indicating that the display was still on; it simply wasn't receiving any input. He turned to Miyu for some sort of confirmation that this was supposed to happen, but she only shrugged.

When he turned back, a flashing prompt had appeared in the bottom left corner of the viewport, followed by eighteen spaces. The prompt blinked impatiently as Fox stared at it, defying his wish for any sort of context.

"Peppy said you would know the password," Miyu offered, wishing she was wearing something heavier than her old, borrowed t-shirt. The bridge's recycled air was suddenly very cold on the lynx's exposed fur.

Fox thought for a moment, counting out the number of spaces on the screen and calculating possible answers in his head. Even more so than the featureless prompt, Peppy's clue was frustrating in its lack of any actual help.

"Was there anything else?" he asked the lynx, turning his head slightly towards her without actually looking away from the viewport.

"No," Miyu shook her head, sounding just a little unsure of herself. The moment hung in the air as Fox picked up on her doubt. "That's all I remember," she finally admitted, understanding Fox's disappointment but still disliking the way he sighed.

He looked down at the keyboard, staring past it into his lap and the deck plating below. How could Peppy just expect him to know the answer to something like _that_? There wasn't even anywhere to start from; no riddle or hint to speak of.

Fox tried thinking back, mentally listing off names and places familiar to himself and the hare. Old family acquaintances, locations around Fox's childhood home on Corneria, events that struck him as particular important to both of them...nothing was coming to mind which was both important enough for Peppy to assume Fox would simply _know_, and fit the eighteen character password requirement. He tried putting various word fragments together in combinations, mixing events with dates, or titles with names, but none would come together in a way he was satisfied with.

Fox had no way of knowing if the password had a failsafe lockout in place either, cutting short any thought he had of simply trying all of his various possible solutions. After all, if Peppy had been careful enough with this piece of information that he had managed to hide it from the rest of crew – even the ever curious Slippy – Fox doubted the hare would have left it susceptible to brute force attempts, or any sort of tampering.

But at the moment, Fox was left with little else he could think of. He had no reason to doubt Miyu's story, and he _had_ to find out what sort of message Peppy had left for him.

Taking a deep breath, Fox carefully picked his first pieced together solution. Peppy's eternal words of wisdom floated through his head just as he began to spell out his mother and father's wedding location.

"_Trust your instincts."_

Fox froze, finger hovering over the final key. A tiny smirk, an island of amusement amidst his sea of trepidation, tugged at his muzzle, and he quickly deleted the letters of his original answer. Starting again, he typed in the new password, filling up the allotted spaces exactly, and tapped the execution key.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, abruptly, Peppy Hare appeared on the screen, forcing a surprised gasp from each of the three occupants of the bridge. The recording took up the entire viewport, stretching the image of the hare to the point where he looked just about life size. The camera taking the recording was at about shoulder height to the hare, who was seated on the end of his bed in his quarters. Miyu recognized the room immediately, having slept there since taking up residence on the _Great Fox_.

"Peppy," Fox couldn't help but whisper. The old hare had been so long removed from his life that the young mercenary could hardly remember what he looked like in motion. He was dressed in his usual overcoat and clothes, serving only to make the memories flowing through Fox's head even sharper.

"Those were your father's words, you know," Peppy began, his lips creasing into a warm smile. Fox could already feel a tightness gripping his chest as he smiled back, part of his mind wanting so badly to pretend it was a two-way transmission, and not a recording. "I guess I sort of inherited them after...well. And if you're listening to this, its probably time for _you _to take over for me."

Peppy chuckled, leaning forward and bracing his palms on his knees. "Speaking of which, I can't wait to tell James about the man you've become; I know he's been waiting. I know he was never a believer in that sort of thing, but your mother and I always tried anyway. Annoyed him to no end." His smile grew even more before it stopped, slowly fading into a thin line.

"I'm sorry you had to find out this way," the hare said after a deep breath. "But understand that the Angels were a secret we had to keep from everyone. Our families, our friends...everyone. You can't imagine how much it tore Jame apart inside knowing that. Having to lie to your face every time he came home; having to lie to his wife." A bit of his smile came back. "Something tells me Vixy always suspected something though. She had an intuition like none other, your mother; always knew you would follow in his footsteps, too. Told me so every time I came to visit."

There was a pause after that. Peppy's eyes clouded over a little, as if he had lost focus on the recording device in front of him. Fox couldn't help but match the hare, memories of his parents dancing before his eyes. His mother had died when he was only a boy, but he could still see her smile so clearly. The way she looked at him when he came home with a good test grade or did his chores had made him happy back then, but the image of such pride on her face was almost too much to think about now.

Peppy shook his head. When he looked back at the camera, his eyes were focused, though a little sad."Just um...just before she passed, and a few years before James and I parted ways with the Angels, we found something on a mission."

"Our target was planetside on Titania; he wasn't that hard to find, being a noted colleague of a younger, less insane Andross. I won't go into the specifics as to what he did, but you've heard all the stories about us. He needed to be taken down. Unfortunately, the assassination was botched, and he escaped to orbit. James and I chased him into Sector X, and for a little while, we lost contact with him in the cloud. When we found him again, we weren't quite sure what to make of what we discovered."

Fox listened as Peppy described a warpgate identical to the one he and his crew had used chasing down Major Wilkins. Word for word, the hare constructed the same mental image Fox had in his head, though even so, if the young mercenary didn't already know such a thing existed, Fox would've had trouble believing him. Their construction was distinctly odd, Peppy explained; not necessarily alien, though it was a far fetched possibility. Just odd. Lylatians had been a space faring people for many centuries, and weren't always peace loving. The Lylat War wasn't the first system wide conflict. It wasn't hard to imagine a secret research project being deployed and subsequently forgotten about in the aftermath of a war.

Peppy went on, explaining how their target was just in the middle of a jump when James and he stumbled across the gate, and it was only James' instinct to turn back that saved the pair from the activation blast.

"When we returned to the scene, there was no trace of the target's ship." Peppy shook his head, shrugging a bit. "We had no idea if it had been destroyed by the blast, or if it had snuck off while we were riding out the shockwave. It wasn't until the next day, when we heard that another Angel strike team operating in Sector Z had found and killed the target, just minutes after he disappeared in the blast, that we realized what we had discovered. It was a warpgate of some sort."

Peppy looked up at the ceiling for a moment, piecing together his words. "The Angels weren't – _aren't_, I guess I should say – a terribly large organization. We had the engineers to reverse engineer some information, but not the cadre of scientists to discover where these gates came from, or who built them. But to simplify the work of what engineers we had...in the heart of each of Lylat's Sectors, hidden by pockets of radiation, there is one of these gates. They connect to each other in a triangle, so by hoping into one, you can end up at either of the other two. In order to get to another gate though, you have to give a 'password' of sorts."

"You might want to call Slippy in at this point," the hare said, smiling. "It get's a little tricky from here on out."

Slippy had been listening intently to Peppy's words up to that point, and couldn't help but brighten a little at the compliment. Linka's approving giggle didn't hurt, either. However, when he turned around to look at Fox, the vulpine was staring at the recording as if he hadn't heard the words. As if he didn't even realize Slippy was in the room. A little crestfallen, but understanding that Fox was probably too swept up in the message to show anything, Slippy turned back to listen to Peppy.

"See, our engineers discovered that in order to activate the gates, you had to broadcast a frequency as you approached one. Using the frequency we recorded our target using in Sector X, they deduced the basic components of the broadcast, and discovered that the frequency is a two part key." He lifted his hands, palms towards the ceiling. "Source, and destination. Like I said, you might need Slippy for this."

Peppy's wry smile faded. "The first half of the transmission is the activation frequency for the gate. The second half gives the receiving gate word something's heading its way. If you're missing the first part, your gate won't open; you're missing the second part, the receiving gate won't open and you won't ever come out the other side. That's how it was explained to me, anyway."

"Thanks to the recording we had of our target in Sector X, our engineers took apart his activation transmission and found that, oddly enough, part of the source portion of it matched the natural frequency of the element Hydrogen. By reverse engineering this information, we found that the Sector Y gate, sure enough, had the activation frequency of Helium. Once we broadcast that frequency, along with what turned out to be a coded coordinate system for your destination gate of choice, we had something which, scientifically, shouldn't exist. A faster than light method of transportation."

"Strangely though, the Sector Z warpgate didn't respond to the frequency of Lithium, as we expected it would. Instead, it opened up to Beryllium, skipping over Lithium entirely. On an elemental scale, you could say we had gates one, two, and four, which was tossed on top of the pile of facts that didn't make sense about these things. Our engineers sent a couple probes through the gates, using possible coordinates for the Lithium gate as destinations, but when none of them showed up on system sweeps, we assumed they were lost and didn't pursue it much further. We had a jumpgate network that very few, if anybody else in Lylat knew about, and we knew how to use it. That was enough."

Peppy took a breath, leaning forward a little. "Now, it's been years since I flew with the Angels. But soon after your father and I left, the few operatives we kept in contact with began disappearing. It was gradual at first, and we didn't think much of it; that was what we were good at, after all. Disappearing. Happened all the time."

"A long, long time passed," he continued, running a hand through the short fur on his head. "We had forgotten all about the Angels, James with you and Vixy to care for, me with my own kin. We hadn't so much as talked to any of them for almost half a decade. Then one of them showed up at my door on Corneria in the middle of the night with a datadisk. He handed it to me without a word, and left."

Peppy paused, his mouth twitching. "I saw him the next morning on the news; his body had been found behind a military base, shot to death. There ah...there weren't any witnesses."

"On that disk were the coordinates of the Lithium gate, along with a note from the Angel who gave it to me, explaining that somebody was hunting them for the information. It never explained how they had found the coordinates, or _why _they were apparently worth so much, or really much else."

"Your father and I decided that we should keep the coordinates with us, under a failsafe lock inside ROB's memory banks. He's a common enough model that nobody would suspect it. And when you leave the Angels, they erase every record of your operations, so nobody but the Angels would know we belonged. As long as none of the operatives gave us up, we'd be safe. And there's no use trying to contact them, even if there are any out there waiting to be contacted. They won't pick up."

Peppy sighed, a small smile returning to his face. "Hopefully, being betrayed's not why I passed. I've had enough of that for a lifetime. Hopefully it was age, or maybe an aneurism yelling at Falco. But consider this my legacy, Fox. Attached to this recording, inside ROB is the only set of coordinates in Lylat for the Lithium gate. Do with them what your head says; you've got a good one on your shoulders, after all. Now, your past self should be arriving back from Riley around now, so I'll have to sign off."

"But know that you've made me proud, Fox; you were the son I never had. Hopefully I did right by you in James' place, though I think you've never really needed the direction. If you can suffer an old hare's last piece of advice though..." Peppy trailed off. His face warmed a bit, and for a brief moment, Fox thought he saw his eyes mist up. It was the regret of wanting to say something, but knowing you'd never get to say it in person. "When you're ready, find someone worth living for, and settle down. I know you're young, and that it doesn't sound all that appealing, but James has always told me that it was smartest thing he ever did with his life."

"Tell Falco that I've missed our tussles, as many headaches as they caused. And tell Slippy not to worry so much; he'll do fine in life. He'll know what that means."

Slippy's cheeks flushed, and he couldn't help a grin from creeping on his face as he stared up at Peppy's image. A soft, golden furred hand gripped his shoulder, squeezing it gently.

"You take care of them Fox," Peppy said, standing up from the bed. "They look to you more than they ever did to me."

* * *

"Come in."

The door swished open, granting the lynx waiting on the other side access to Fox's bedroom. She stepped in tentatively, padding into the low light thrown off by the desk lamp next to his bed.

"You know, they're gonna start talking if they catch you coming by my quarters like this," Fox smirked from the bed, sitting cross legged atop it. His shorts and t-shirt indicated he was ready for the night to pass, but the fact that he had been sitting there indicated that something was keeping him up.

Miyu laughed, coming in and sitting at the desk chair. "Oh sure; that's a story old as time. By the way, how's your ah," she started, gesturing awkwardly to her forehead. "You know."

"Good," Fox replied, rubbing his temple. "Can barely feel it anymore, actually."

Miyu smiled, and a beat of silence passed. Her own pajamas helped indicate the late hour of the night, their brevity showing how impulsive a decision it had been to visit Fox, something she was regretting a bit as she suppressed a shiver. He apparently kept his room a bit cooler than Peppy's.

"So are you okay?" she finally asked.

Fox gave the lynx a quizzical look before nodding, realizing what she was talking about. "Yeah; yeah, I'm fine."

"That was a lot to take in," Miyu added, crossing her arms to ward off the chill. "Slippy, ah...he told me he thought you might need to spill a bit."

"Yeah," Fox agreed, glancing down at his hands. "But I'm glad to have seen it. It's good to know there's a reason somebody was after Peppy." He looked at Miyu. "Means its more likely he's still alive somewhere."

"How do you know?" the lynx asked, only realizing after the fact that questioning Fox's belief that his father figure was living wasn't exactly polite.

"He's tough," Fox replied, face brightening a little. "If he's got something they want, they won't kill him until he gives it up. And he won't give it up."

Miyu nodded, agreeing with him. She hadn't seen much of the old hare, but what she had seen had impressed her. Peppy had a certain underlying sharpness about him. The fact that he turned out to be an Angel certainly didn't hurt his chances either.

"So now that we have the something they want, what are we going to do with it?"

"Nothing right now," Fox answered, bracing his chin on his palm. "Warpgates and coordinates and 'Lithium' don't really concern me. There'll be time to figure all that out once we get Peppy back, and once we stop this war from breaking out."

"C'mon," Miyu insisted. "You can't tell me you're not the least bit interested in what's going on with these gate things."

"Oh I am alright," Fox admitted. "I'm plenty interested. But I've also got priorities. And unless these gates figure into finding Peppy, or stopping Bauker, they don't factor too high up there."

"Yeah," Miyu relented, rocking her head back and forth. It was fairly obvious she wasn't entirely convinced.

"In the meantime though, this stays with us," Fox said, changing his tone. "Even inside the team, the fewer who know about this, the better." Miyu began nodding, but the vulpine leaned forward a little. "I'm serious, Miyu. If Wolf or Siona or anyone else out there learn that we have these coordinates, I don't want to have to take the chance that they won't sell us out to Bauker."

"I got it," the lynx assured Fox.

"I know they've helped us so far, but I can't get this little voice out of my head that says we can't tr-"

"I said I got it, Fox," Miyu deadpanned, her voice rising. "The secret's safe with me."

"Okay," the vulpine let up, meeting her gaze for a moment before shaking his head, running a hand through the short fur on his head. "Sorry, maybe it _was_ a lot to take in."

"Mmhm; s'why I said it," Miyu answered, her smile stealing any harshness from her words.

Fox smirked before suppressing a yawn, blinking the weariness from his emerald eyes. He glanced at the clock on the nightstand next to his bed, noting the early hour of the morning.

"Alright, jeez Fox. I can take a hint," Miyu said, standing up with a stretch. "Better let you get your beauty sleep."

The vulpine laughed. "Much obliged. Can't meet Wolf and crew tomorrow with bags under my eyes."

For a brief moment, Miyu's smile matched his, and she suddenly found herself not wanting to leave. Something, some invisible force was pushing her ever so gently away from the door as she stepped towards it, as though she were forgetting something. As though a party was ending and she didn't want to go home yet. But what could be causing that feeling? Did she forget to say something? There seemed to be a heaviness in the air, as though someone had missed a cue somewhere.

"'Night, Miyu," Fox finally said, swinging his legs over the side of his bed and fiddling with his alarm clock.

"Ah, sure," she quickly replied. "Goodnight."

That was it.

She padded out of Fox's quarters and made her way back to Peppy's old room, seeking to escape the cold of the corridor as fast as possible. Thankfully, nobody was up and about to delay her, and she reached her destination quickly.

Miyu tapped the door controls behind her, hearing the locking mechanism activate before dimming the lights and climbing into bed. The oddness that had plagued Peppy's room before for her had vanished after the first few nights there, allowing her the luxury of focusing all of her attention on what had just happened.

It was such a simple word, one that few would give any thought to. But Miyu couldn't honestly remember the last time she had said 'goodnight' to somebody, or have anybody say it to her. The companionship it implied, and the familiarity required to utter it was something she was simply still getting used to. She wondered just how long she would have stood there thinking of what to say if Fox hadn't casually done it for her. She cringed a little to think of it.

The time Miyu had spent with the Star Fox team since tracking them down on Corneria had been so hectic that it was only now, when she had a few days of downtime to reflect on things, that she realized how out of place she couldn't help but feel. This family had taken her in, and despite all of her misgivings, and everything they had done to her, she found herself enjoying it. Being surrounded by people who didn't swap out every week as they had during her freelancing days was something she could definitely get used to. Getting a chance to actually get to know people was both distinctly odd and strangely enticing.

Miyu rolled onto her side and curled up a little, hugging the covers closer.

Whatever that feeling was – that alien, unusual sense of safety – she reasoned she could do with more of it. It seemed to seep from the walls, surrounding her spirit with warmth and comfort, doing for her mind what the bed sheets did for her weary body.

Fox's last words echoed through her head as she drifted off, allowing herself to utter one of them aloud before surrendering herself to a deep sleep.

"Goodnight."

* * *

The next morning found Fox standing around the rim of yet another briefing projector, this time in a room adjacent to the _Lone Wolf_'s bridge.

Gathered around the circular railing was Wolf's cadre of Alphas, the surviving commanders of his surviving forces. Fox recognized the captain of the _Vitahly_, along with who must have been the captain of Wolf's other frigate, the _Osgard_. They were dressed in red and black navy uniforms, predictably trimmed with slightly more flashy material than their subordinates. Next to them was the commander of Wolf's remaining marines, dressed in similarly high minded clothes, though with a face to reflect her hard bitten climb to her current rank. The soldier was standing stoic while the frigate captains discussed some matter or another, the only noise in the room aside from the ever present _hum _of the massive battleship's various systems.

Captain Hartford was the only other occupant in the room, and Fox was glad of his presence. The husky had just come from a physical performed by Wolf's medical staff, despite Sophie's insistence that he was healthy, if a little malnourished. He certainly seemed healthy to the mercenary; the man was practically beaming. Being included in Wolf's planning, and the prospect of fighting back against Bauker put a smile on the man's face, though Fox thought it may have also had something to do with his current, freshly washed clothes. Hartford had insisted on wearing the same Cornerian greens he had been imprisoned with back on the _Broadsword _when he received word that he had been summoned to Wolf's meeting. To his credit and shared amusement with Fox, the husky had received all sorts of strange looks upon walking through the _Lone Wolf_ on the way up from the _Great Fox_.

Seeing all of the official uniforms, both green and red, made Fox feel a little self conscious about the plain, usual clothes and flight vest he had on, but before he could devote too much time to the thought, the doors to the briefing room opened. The Alphas promptly saluted.

"At ease," Wolf O'Donnell acknowledged as he strode through the doorway, brandishing a datadisk and handing it to one of the frigate captains. Behind the lupine came another pair of officers, an Alpha and a Beta, judging by the insignias on their respective shoulders.

As the last attendees took their places around the projector, the captain with the datadisk fed it into the machine. An image almost instantly sprung forward as the installation hummed to life, depicting a floating, slowly rotating wolf's paw in deep crimson.

"Let's get started," Wolf said as he crossed his arms, standing a stride back from the railing. His uniform, as Fox was coming to know it as, was the same as always: black trench coat and black and gray combat fatigues. A red undershirt poked through the collar of the fatigues, allowing the lupine to show his fleet's colors without resorting to the standard uniforms.

"We've learned some information during the past week that will drastically change how we're going about this operation," he started, his voice a commanding growl, toned down for the close quarters of the room. He keyed a small remote, and the paw floating above the projector faded into an image of a series of stones, arranged in a circle. The yellow gases completely taking up the background gave away the picture's location. "During the hunt for Major Wilkins in Sector Y, Fox McCloud and his mercenaries discovered that Warlord Bauker has access to a jumpgate system."

"The system spans Lylat," Wolf continued, keying his remote again. The projector's image changed to an overview of the Lylat system. "Each of the three Sectors in the system contains a gate, which can access either of the other two at any given time."

Fox listened as Wolf explained how the gates worked in broad terms, and how they were the reason behind Bauker's forces' uncanny ability to seemingly disappear and reappear at whim around Lylat. For their part, the gathered officers showed little emotion, accepting their leader's explanations as though they were being told information for a test. Even when Wolf described the events of the mission to take down Wilkins, not one of them even turned towards Fox to acknowledge his and his team's efforts. The vulpine wasn't expecting congratulations, but some sort of recognition wouldn't have killed them.

If Fox didn't catch the underlying signals that he was looked down upon by Wolf's upper echelon officers before, it was coming through loud and clear now.

"Utilizing the information gathered from the _Great Fox_'s sensors, we've pieced together the transmission the Major's broadcast before activating the Sector Y gate. Bauker's captain from the _Broadsword _cracked under interrogation, and using the information he supplied, we have a working password that will grant a one way trip to Sector Z."

"However, as we no longer have the engineering or scientific staff we had collected before Gage's assault, we must turn to outside interests to gather any further information on the subject. These gates provide too great a tactical advantage to pass up entirely. To that end, Lady Siona-"

"Lord O'Donnell," the _Osgard_'s captain interrupted. "Forgive me, but won't Warlord Bauker know that we have access to these gates?" He turned to Fox. "The Star Fox mercenaries weren't exactly _careful_ about covering their tracks. Bauker will have ships stationed at every one of these gates, ready to ambush anything that comes through."

Fox stared back at the Alpha, wanting more than anything at that moment to wipe that creeping smirk of superiority off the man's face. The Alpha hadn't been there. How could he judge what was feasible or not for the Star Fox team during those moments in Sector Z?

The mercenary held his composure though, reminding himself that any loss of it would only result in further loss of respect amongst Wolf's organization, which was something he could do without.

"If that is the case, it will significantly tie down his forces," Wolf replied. "I received word from Lady Siona recently that he recently bartered information on our fleet makeup and loadout from her. In order to blockade the gates effectively, knowing what we have, he'll have to make sure each of them has enough firepower to at least match our own. That means a pair of frigates and a battleship, plus escorts, minimum."

"Even bolstered by Admiral Gage's Seventh Fleet," the _Vitahly'_s captain admitted. "Three gates worth of protection would be a significant portion of Bauker's hardware. Combined with the Cornerians' route of Warlord Ypson, it puts him in quite a bind."

"It almost seems more advantageous to let Bauker believe we could jump through a gate at any given time, whether or not we actually can," a third Alpha spoke up.

"We will pursue the access codes to the other gates regardless," Wolf uttered, his gravely voice cutting any further comments down. "Lady Siona's sources have informed us of someone who claims to have them, and has been trying to contact us. He's willing to give them to us for a price."

"What price?" Fox asked.

"Sanctuary," Wolf replied. "The contact is a captain with Admiral Gage's Seventh Fleet and wants to defect to our forces."

"Seventh Fleet," Hartford echoed quietly. "What's his name?"

Wolf glanced at the husky without turning his head. "Siona didn't say."

"His ship is currently in orbital dry dock around Aquas for resupply." The projector image transitioned to a rotating image of the water world. "Admiral Gage is still trying to keep up appearances of routine with Cornerian High Command, and is making sure his crews are spotted in plenty of public places in the Northern parts of Lylat, which he was given to patrol. This particular captain's crew is on shore leave in the island town of Barrados. We'll set up the rendezvous there."

Aquas rapidly ballooned in size as the 'camera' zoomed in through the cloud cover and focused on one of the many volcanic islands that dotted the watery surface of the planet's single, all encompassing ocean. On one end of the roughly circular landscape, the peak of the inactive volcano that long ago made the island soared skyward. It towered over the rest of the terrain, which was a jumbled mix of concrete landing pads, palm trees, and lightweight structures. It looked as though somebody had taken all of the ingredients of a starport, a jungle, and coastal city and threw them into a blender.

"Our delegation will land at Barrados disguised as civilians, make contact with the captain, and secure his exodus. They will then meet up with the _Osgard _on the fringes of Sector Y."

"Who will make contact?" one of the Alphas asked.

"...Captain Hartford," Wolf replied after a short pause, staring at the husky in question.

Hartford met the stare evenly, nodding as if he expected the assignment. Already in his mind he was running through a list of the captains he knew from the Seventh Fleet, trying to determine who the defector could be.

"A _Cornerian _will be negotiating on our behalf?" the _Osgard's _Alpha said, his face contorting a bit as though he had just eaten something disagreeable.

Wolf threw a glance at the Alpha who spoke. With his arms crossed and an eye patch covering one of his lavender eyes, the brief centering of the lupine's gaze was enough to visibly disarm the officer. Fox watched with an appreciative eye; it wasn't anyone who could dress down a smarmy subordinate with a glare.

"If the Captain agrees," Wolf visually panned the gathered Alphas. "I do not have to remind you all that despite our intentions, we are not perceived well by either side of this conflict. The Cornerian High Command would shoot us on sight, and Bauker's Alliance considers us traitors to Venom's vision. If we are going to have any legitimacy in the eyes of those who would aid us, we need to play every card we can."

Wolf's gaze returned to Hartford. "Captain Hartford's firsthand knowledge as a former officer of Gage's Seventh Fleet makes him far more qualified than anyone else here." Hartford was still meeting Wolf's gaze. "Captain, Fox has informed me of your intention to join us as a contractor; if that's true, consider this your first contract."

The husky let a few moments pass by, gathering his words. He already knew he was going to accept the offer; that part was a given. When Fox and Bill had discussed the idea of joining Wolf O'Donnell's forces – and the impetus behind Wolf's goals in the war – Hartford had agreed almost without hesitation. He didn't know how helpful he could be as a captain without a ship, but he knew that until he found something else, this was the best chance he had to help Corneria. He certainly couldn't go back to his home planet, not while Admiral Gage was still in command of the Seventh Fleet. He'd be declared a traitor the minute he was recognized.

Instead, he took some time to ready himself to make a request of the wolf before him. Hartford knew that Wolf O'Donnell was a physically intimidating man; he had read all of the reports on Star Wolf during the Lylat War. But the husky was unprepared for the sheer weight of Wolf's presence as the mercenary-turned-Warlord stood staring at him. Like a young wild animal possesses an instinctual fear of predators they've never seen before, so too did the Cornerian captain possess an instinctual distrust of the man before him. There was no way he would allow himself to be left alone in the care of a warlord who had killed so many of his brothers in arms.

"I'll accept," Hartford said. "On the condition that Star Fox act as my escort."

"Done," Wolf agreed without hesitation.

"A Cornerian _and _mercenaries?" the doubtful Alpha nearly exclaimed.

"You'll have a squad of my marines accompanying as observers," Wolf continued, casting a quick glance at the marine Alpha standing near him. The female officer nodded in understanding, accepting the implicit command to select a squad for the assignment. The way Wolf spoke made it seem as though it was the plan all along. Or that he was simply exceptionally well prepared to adapt, something Hartford was aware of being the more likely option. "But Star Fox will fly air support and lead the security detail. The Beta here has your briefing. You depart this evening. Make your preparations."

"Unbelievable," the first Alpha muttered, his continuing dismay at the situation unreflected in the other officers present.

"Moving on," Wolf began again, ignoring his subordinate's misgivings. "More ships aligned with Bauker have been sighted around Sector Y and Meteos. The sightings are sporadic, but we know that the Cornerians are unaware of these intrusions in territory they consider 'safe'. To that end, we will be employing our own hit and fade tactics..."

* * *

A/N:

The next few chapters are already planned out; all I have to do is find time to sit down and write. Easier said than done, unfortunately :/ But I got an absurd number of reviews this past chapter, so lets go ahead and get to that:

**chaos Leader:** I'm glad to hear what you said about the action sequences; I always have fun writing those, and I feel that they're at least as important to a Star Fox story as characterization. Star Fox is, after all, a series of action games. But on the flip side, those remarks about the characterizations are completely legitimate. I'll do my best to give the slower, more emotional scenes a bit more depth next time around. Thanks for the review, buddy.

**AndrossKenobi:** Glad to hear it AK; we'll see what happens with Bill's doubts :) Thanks for the feedback!

**pkmnfan11:** Happy to oblige! As far as sparing the Major...perhaps Bill would have had Rhena not gotten all trigger happy. Maybe? I guess we'll never know though, eh? Thanks for the review!**  
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**BananaBison:** Thanks Banana! That's very kind. If you ever feel like saying more though, I won't complain. Just ask RedBay and chaos Leader :P**  
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**nothernmegas:** Much obliged megas; that description nails it pretty well. By the way, love your signature saying. Good one to keep in mind.

**EverCloud:** First of all, hi! Thanks for sticking with the story for so long! Second, "rushing the plot" might be an unfortunate byproduct of getting the story moving. You have a legitimate point, but its a balance between a lagging narrative where not much of importance happens (like the early chapters), or moving things along at a clip that could be considered a little fast. But I'll see what I can do about letting the story ease through the plot at a more comfortable pace. And to me, Falco's always had the kind of sarcastic attitude that makes him perfect for a comic relief type character. Unfortunately, Nintendo always gives him the most awkward attempts at said sarcasm for dialogue. Anyway, glad you like that style! Thanks for the feedback EverCloud!

**RedBay:** Thanks for the kind words! Happy to answer questions when I can; more often then not in answering them I learn things about the characters myself, so its a win-win. And I'm glad you enjoyed the ending. I never liked the idea that "bad guys" are bad strictly for evil's sake. They're living, breathing people too; they have their own wants and dreams, just like "heroes." And virtually nobody ever does the wrong thing intentionally. Regardless of whether they're actually doing something good or evil, in their minds its always the right thing, and I've always felt the fact that, in certain lights, anybody's view can be justified is an incredibly compelling part of being a person. ...Er, sorry; coming off my soapbox now. Thanks for the review RedBay :)

**LilGstryker:** There is literally (literally) not a day that's gone by since you posted where I didn't read that review to brighten my day. Glad to have you back LilG! Your words are far too kind; hopefully my writing can live up to them some day :) But hey! I don't want to be responsible for missed learning. Put the phone down and pay attention! Plenty of time to read between classes :P

**The Citadel:** Ah yeah; "show, don't tell" was one of the first pieces of advice I got on this site, and probably one of the best. Hopefully I've done okay at doing more the former. Heheh, and I had forgotten all about the "psshwsshhsh" sound "word." My bad. But you know, I think we share a lot of the same ideas with OCs. Far too often they become heroes of their own, but still in stories revolving around the Star Fox team, which results in the OCs outshining the main cast, which is no good. Hopefully that doesn't seep into my writing too much.

It really made me smile to read that my action scenes "FEEL like a Star Fox game." That was the single most important thread I was trying to lay out with this fic from day one (5 1/2 years ago). Don't get me wrong, I love writing emotion and drama into a story, but if you're writing a Star Fox fic, you've gotta _feel _the dogfights and experience the barrel rolls, you know? I'm still working on it, but I'm really glad to hear I'm at least making progress. As far as the more poetic parts of the story, I didn't mean for any of them to come off as attempts at bragging or showing off. I just wanted to inject some unique things into the story, maybe try out a few things to see if they pan out. Some worked and I've kept (spoken word logs), others didn't and I've stopped (the jolted phrase thingy you mentioned). I'll be sure to keep an eye on them in the future though. Thanks for the review Citadel; I look forward to hearing more from you should you keep reviewing.

Thank you again to everyone who read and reviewed the story! Now stay tuned for a story recap.

-Redd

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-STAR FOX: Mercenaries - (Note: this recap is designed for those who read the story a while back and don't remember some of the events, not for new readers who want to jump right in. I say this as an excuse to gloss over my poor recapping abilities)

Our story begins as the Star Fox team finds themselves in the midst of another contract, working an escort job in Meteos for indifferent smugglers. Though they saved the Lylat System during the massive war with Andross, their status as mercenaries left them largely out of the spotlight. Now strapped for cash and desperate for contracts, they take what work they can get.

During their assignment, the convoy they were assigned to protect came under attack by a rival faction. Fox and Falco, flying escort, fended off the raiders. One of the freelance attackers, a young lynx named Miyu, found her ship disabled and left for dead in the endless asteroid fields of Meteos. When her former employers came to collect their property (preferably minus the pilot), Fox and Falco stumbled across their salvage operation returning from their contract's termination point, and intervened.

Miyu, critically injured and fading fast, was sheltered aboard the _Great Fox, _and taken with the Star Fox team to Corneria. There, she was offloaded to the care of a hospital while the team went back to hunting contracts. They never expected to see or hear from her again.

Bill Grey, an old academy friend of Fox's, contacted the team shortly thereafter with news of a lucrative military contract. Star Fox agreed at once, and flew to meet Bill in Sector X, where they would help escort a military supply convoy to an isolated depot within the massive blue cloud.

However, soon after lifting off from Corneria's New Memories Starport, the team discovered a stowaway aboard the _Great Fox_. Or rather, the stowaway discovered them. Miyu, having escaped the hospital and snuck aboard their ship, was out for vengeance. Far from the thanks the team expected for saving her life, they received the full force of her rage. Miyu, the image of her ship's demise as the result of a dogfight with Fox still fresh in her mind, had come to exact revenge. She knocked out Slippy and was close to taking down Fox before she was incapacitated by Falco.

Miyu woke up in the _Great Fox_'s medical bay to a proposition from Peppy. With Slippy out of commission, thanks to the lynx's handiwork, the Star Fox team was in need of another pilot for Bill's contract. Knowing she was a pilot, Peppy, much to the surprise of Fox, offered her the chance to fly with them for an equal cut of the contract. She grudgingly accepted.

The Star Fox team met Bill and his squadron of Cornerian pilots in Sector X, though not in the manner they were expecting. Bill's squadron had come under attack by a swarm of hostile fighters, and it was only Star Fox's timely intervention that saved the squadron from complete annihilation. Bolstered by the mercenaries, Bill and his remaining pilots completed their assigned duty, seeing the military convoy safely to Yohan Depot. Far from the end of their troubles, however, Bill and the Star Fox team found themselves in the middle of a system wide web of deception.

In the aftermath of the Lylat War, a group of Warlords rose to rally Venom's remaining forces. To the Cornerians and the rest of Lylat, they were a loosely organized bunch of pirates, and campaigns were launched to put them down. However, the Warlords were far more organized than first realized, with most of them having formed an alliance behind one man. Warlord Bauker. In addition, a traitor in the Cornerian ranks, Admiral Gage, commander of the Seventh Fleet, was putting in motion plans to defect his fleet to the Warlords. Filled with captains and crews sympathetic to the Warlords' idea of a Lylat free from Cornerian dominance, the Seventh Fleet, while remaining undetected by Cornerian High Command, was already hard at work siphoning supplies to Bauker and his alliance. One of the bases running this supply chain was Yohan.

The trap was sprung, but Fox, his crew, and most of the remaining Cornerian pilots escaped. However, in the chaos, Peppy was captured. Unable to turn back, the Star Fox team ran. Soon after, they discovered that, along with the three surviving Cornerian pilots, they had been given bounties by the Cornerian military. With no other option, Fox, Falco and Slippy, along with the Cornerian pilots Bill Grey, Rhena Haggerty, and Linka Pyrokanzia, began their life on the run. Miyu opted out, disappearing at the first freeport the team encountered.

A month later, Fox and his expanded team, still strapped for cash and living low, discover their first real lead on Peppy's whereabouts. Determined that getting back the hare meant finding out who was behind the treachery at Yohan, the team follow up on the information, after Miyu returns to them in the back alleys of a Cornerian city. First though, they make a pit stop on Shoana Freeport in Meteos to gather supplies.

While there, they ran into Katt Monroe, working at a spare parts shop, along with Bill's old friend Jason Mierse at his armory. There, Bill learns that his fiance', Sophie Arkanian, was kidnapped by bounty hunters in an effort to flush the Cornerian and the rest of the Star Fox team out. The team leave Shoana Freeport, and after being rescued from a different squad of bounty hunters by Katt and Jason, the entire group meet back on the _Great Fox_. There, they discover that their home had been raided. The intruders lay dead, the work of Linka's last ditch effort to protect Slippy and the ship. But the defense left the young Linka comatose, gunshot and bruised.

Bill and Rhena split off to rescue Sophie, while the rest of the team, with Katt and Jason in tow, seek out a freighter containing important information on Peppy's whereabouts. Along the way, they are ambushed by a Cornerian Seventh Fleet patrol, and seek refuge in a sensor-baffling debris field and reactor cloud. There, they are discovered by none other than Wolf O'Donnell.

Wolf became a Warlord following Andross' defeat, but split off from the other Warlords to become an independent entity. His base had just been destroyed by Admiral Gage, afraid that Wolf would work against Bauker's alliance. The remnants of Wolf's battered fleet took refuge in the reactor cloud the _Great Fox _now found itself in. Wolf O'Donnell, rather than harboring resentment for his rival, welcomed Fox and his team aboard his flagship, the _Lone Wolf_, and explained Bauker's alliance, Admiral Gage's betrayal, and the Cornerian High Command's ignorance to the coming war. Wolf asked Fox and his team to join him, working to prevent the Warlords from executing their surprise war against the Cornerians. Fox agreed.

Since then, the Star Fox team, made whole again when Bill and Rhena returned with Bill's fiance Sophie, has been working contracts for Wolf's fleet.

Slippy, on the verge of finding a true friend in Linka before she was rendered comatose, is seeing her "ghost" wherever he goes, an ethereal entity of unknown origin that seems to want to continue their friendship while Linka herself lies unconscious in Wolf O'Donnell's medical bay.

Rhena, an exotic pilot to begin with, finds herself unable to speak Lylatian after the team's unexpected encounter with Lylat's hidden warpgate system, in use by Bauker but unknown to anyone else.

Miyu, after plying Lylat's freeports as a freelancer, is unsure of what to make of the "family" she has been welcome in to. Their overtures of friendship are unheard of to the lynx, used to fending for herself in dark corners and grimy stations. One thing is for sure though; she could get used to the world Fox is showing her with his friends.

Falco and Katt are as brash and harsh to each other as always, while Bill and Sophie are enjoying every moment of each other. Jason tries his best to help where he can.

And Fox McCloud finds himself leading the way, keeping the team focused and sharp as they work with Wolf O'Donnell to halt the march of war, and ultimately find Peppy Hare. The young vulpine knows Peppy is still alive out there...somewhere.


	37. Chapter 37: Barrados

**XXXVII: **Barrados

* * *

_Mr. Keelik,_

_I would like to speak to you about a potential business opportunity. I will be in Barrados tonight. Time is important._

_Sincerely,_

_Mr. Silver_

* * *

The _Cat's Paw _set down on its landing struts with a hydraulic _hiss_, coming to a rest shortly before the angular _Blood Tip _behind it. The pair of noncombat ships took up about half of the available floor area, leaving just enough room for the duo of CDF fighters that swooped in after them. The narrow, agile fighter craft landed just behind the shuttles, creating a box formation that left little available deck space.

The tight fit was a lucky break for those within the four craft; if any more room had been required, they would have had to spring for a larger docking bay, or settled for _Threshold _Station's public hanger, neither of which was appealing. The public hanger would have condemned any hope of privacy or security for their ships, and a larger private bay would have cost far more credits than they were willing to part with, even with the funds they had been provided with by Wolf O'Donnell.

While the bay they had purchased for the next few days was expensive enough, they got what they paid for. The slick steel walls of the docking bay were clean and ran without break up to the ceiling. A single double door was the only point of entry, guaranteeing that any trespassers into the bay would be seen immediately by whoever remained inside. The deck plating was sterilized to the point of reflection, glowing a little with the florescent light from the panels in the ceiling.

About the time the CDF fighters were powering down their engines, the doors to the _Cat's Paw _and the _Blood Tip _deployed, allowing the passengers within to disembark. A group of six gathered by the hanger door, awaiting the arrival of the pilots of the snubfighters as they ran through their cool down procedures, while another four loitered around the shuttles. Once the fighter pilots joined the group of six, they proceeded through the double doors, leaving the remaining four behind.

* * *

"Welcome to _Threshold_ Station, your port of call for all that scenic Aquas has to offer. Please visit one of our many information kiosks..."

The automatic welcome message played from hidden speakers as the group exited their private docking bay, and entered the station proper. Their door was one of the last in a line of nondescript entrances to the station, stretching down the main concourse. Like the rest of those moving up and down the various concourses and hallways, they were dressed in preparation for sandy beaches and balmy weather, each of them carrying a duffel of some sort. The only exceptions were the two pilots of the snubfighters, still dressed in their respective flight suits.

"So you sure your guys will be okay in there?" Falco asked, gesturing back at the open door they had just come through and shifting the weight of the duffel strap over his shoulder. His clothes reflected a slightly militaristic approach to civilian tropical fashions. An olive drab button down, adorned with faux military patches, lay atop a pair of khaki shorts, both made of light, breathable materials.

"I am," Gamma Crendon replied, the last out of the docking bay. Like Aush a few steps ahead of him, the jackal was dressed in plain, uninteresting civilian clothes. The goal to blend in with the hundreds of other vacationers aboard _Threshold _station fell a little short for Wolf's marines though, as their distinctly disciplined posture and battle-hardened faces caused them to stick out more than they would've liked. "The Delta commanding them is a good marine; they won't let anyone touch your ships."

"And getting our _luggage _through security?"

"Aush has it covered," Crendon answered. Hearing this, Aush glanced behind him at the Gamma, nodding in acknowledgment and hefting his bag a little for emphasis. "We've got a contact in the security detail here, same guy who crashed the local bounty boards for a few days; he'll smuggle your pistols down." He gestured at Aush's duffle bag. "They won't be much, but it'll be better than nothing down on Barrados."

"Even Katt's little pea shooter?" the avian asked, loud enough so that the feline could hear him from the middle of their group. The concourse was noisy enough that nobody who wasn't listening specifically for it would catch on to what they were talking about. "Honestly, I know Barrados has a 'no firearms' policy, but we could probably put that thing in a carry on and nobody would care."

"Boys and their toys," Katt giggled, dropping back a few paces to get closer to Falco as they walked. Her outfit reflected her own take on what to wear to a summer resort, consisting of little more than a coverup string-tied at the naval, with a bikini top plainly visible underneath. A small pair of shorts completed the look, along with a flashy beach bag. "See hon, its funny because you think that a girl even cares about that sort of thing." The smile she flashed him would have devastated a lesser man with the amount of apparent pleasure she took in berating Falco. "Besides, I gave it to Miyu."

"Thanks, by the way," Miyu said as she joined them, adjusting the backpack she had slung on one bare shoulder. Her black top was loose and airy, and though more modest than Katt's, certainly fit the 'beach' theme. Her knee-length skirt was a deep blue, matching her eyes, and slit up her left thigh. A strap around her right thigh was hidden underneath it, currently empty, but perfect for concealing the small weapon they were talking about.

"Won't do you any good in a fight," Falco quipped.

"But see, that's my point," Katt retorted, still in front of the avian and glancing back at him. She shook her hair out. "We're lovers, not fighters."

"Can't I love a good fight?" Miyu asked with a grin.

They continued to bicker as they passed under a low hanging sign, beckoning those vacationers destined for the resort island of Barrados to continue through. A few steps ahead of them, the remaining three members of the group were discussing the particulars of why they had come to Barrados in the first place.

"So the Gamma's going to sit with us during the meeting as well?" Hartford asked. His white, short sleeved, collared shirt, combined with long, lightweight pants, gave him the air of a businessman on vacation. It was a fitting look for the older husky, still plenty young enough to pull it off.

Fox nodded, taking a moment to glance at a departures board as they passed it, making sure their shuttle to the surface was on time. Having just piloted one of the CDF fighters, he was clad in his normal flight vest and clothes, more than a little aware of the fact that he stuck out because of it. "He is; one of Wolf's conditions."

"And you'll be..."

"We'll be around," Fox said with a smirk. "The rest of us will be in or nearby the diner tomorrow morning."

"All of you though?" Hartford replied skeptically. "Don't get me wrong, I understand the need for security, but six seems like overkill for a private meeting."

"You're assuming that nobody knows about it," Fox said warningly. He shrugged. "But I didn't have much of a choice. Wolf wanted his marines, Falco's a great shot, Miyu's solid, and Rhena here wouldn't let anyone else take her CDF. Right?"

Rhena nodded resolutely from the other side of Hartford, dressed in her Cornerian flightsuit. The team had recently managed to convince her to get the green clothes repaired to a respectable level, fixing the frays and tears. The wolf had resisted at first, her utilitarian nature considering it a waste, but ultimately gave in.

"Slippy and Jason are working on the Arwings back on the _Lone Wolf_," Fox added, explaining why Star Fox's main snubfighters hadn't been taken on the mission. "They didn't seem all that excited about the idea of beaches, anyway."

"And Katt?" Hartford asked.

Fox laughed. "_You _try telling her that a contract will take place a beach and she isn't invited. If those eyes don't get you, those claws will."

The Cornerian husky laughed along with the mercenary as they approached the security checkpoint. Beyond it, down the wide hallway, they could make out a docking bay filled with a half dozen shuttles in various states of refueling and passenger loading. Last minute advertisements for various establishments and services on Barrados littered the corridor walls, shouting at the team in neon letters and promised deals. Little kiosks selling sunglasses and wide brimmed hats accompanied some of the signs.

Fox drank it all in as he fished a sheaf of tickets from his pocket, admitting to himself that he wasn't exactly disappointed as to where the meeting would take place. After all, it had been so long since he had taken the time to enjoy life planetside.

* * *

"Hey Slip, where does the Gamma oh-two connection go again?"

Slippy looked up at the source of the question from inside Falco's Arwing's open cockpit, across the _Great Fox_'s hanger. There his eyes fell on Jason, peeking out from the fuselage of Miyu's Arwing, his jumpsuit covered with the usual dirt and grease that tended to accumulate whenever someone started poking around inside the ships.

"Theta oh-four," Slippy shouted in reply before turning back to his programming work.

A small datapad was hooked to the Arwing's console with a couple of leads, feeding new code into the fighter's computer as Slippy wrote it. Before he could get back into his rhythm though, he heard someone clearing their throat. Looking up, he saw Linka perched within arm's reach on the lip of the cockpit and the Arwing's nose, sitting cross legged and peering down at him. She was wearing a plain t-shirt and shorts, with a soldering bandolier strapped across her chest and an oily rag tucked into her pocket. She waved her hand a little, drawing attention to the three fingers she had up.

"Er, Theta oh-_three_," Slippy corrected himself, looking back at Jason for a moment. "S-sorry."

Jason didn't reappear from beneath the Arwing, but he stuck an arm out, flashing Slippy a thumbs up.

"Thanks," Slippy said quietly, glancing at Linka for a moment before going back to his work.

"Don't mention it," the coyote replied with a smile. She suddenly took on a mockingly concerned expression. "Seriously, don't; he'll think you're crazy."

Slippy couldn't help but laugh with her as his fingers typed furiously away at his datapad.

The toad and Jason had been busy modifying the Arwings all day, working to install capacitors like the one already in Fox's fighter. The fact that the weapons system he came up with had performed so well during its first live test made Slippy proud; he had been responsible for most of the team's upgrades and modifications over the years, but this was one of his most gratifying achievements. He had been happy to comply when Fox asked him to modify the other Arwings to give them the same charging capability as his own. He was also a little concerned when Fox mentioned the system-shorting issues the prototype had caused, but for the most part, Slippy was happy. Just another puzzle to solve.

Jason had volunteered to assist the toad, and was doing well for the most part. He was lagging a little behind Star Fox's genius mechanic – he was still working on the internal wiring while Slippy was already working on the combat system programming – but that was to be expected with an unfamiliar system. Slippy was grateful for the help regardless.

"So whadya think you'll do after this?" Linka asked, gripping her feet and idly rocking back and forth a little.

Slippy shrugged, not looking up from his datapad. "I don't know; p-probably get dinner."

Linka paused, listening to the tapping of various character keys being struck.

"No," she said quietly, "I mean, with Sophie."

Slippy stopped typing and looked up at her. Linka's face was barely hinting at sullen, but the toad spotted it nonetheless. He had gotten to the point where she no longer made him ill at ease whenever she decided to appear. He had even gotten to the point where he could talk with her as comfortably as he could with Fox or Bill, the knowledge that she wasn't actually real giving him a social confidence he otherwise lacked. Right now, though, he found himself unable to say anything. He sighed, his eyes losing focus for a moment before going back to his work.

"I need to ask her," he finally said, trying to put the non-existent young girl's expression out of his mind but failing. "I just want to find out what's wrong with me. That can't hurt anything, c-can it? Just asking?"

"But why?" she replied, cocking her head to the side. "Isn't it enough that I'm here?"

"But you're _not_ here," Slippy said. "You're up in Wolf's m-medical ward, hooked up to all sorts of machines."

"I know..." she trailed off, glancing off into the distance. "I guess I just don't like the idea of hearing that I'm a figment of your imagination." Linka looked down at him again, her mouth curled into a slightly sour pout. "I don't like being called a figment."

"Well, if you're not a figment, and you're not a ghost, what are you?"

Linka opened her mouth to reply, but before she could speak, a new voice filled the hanger.

"Hey Jason!" Bill shouted from the hallway entrance to the docking bay. "We've gotta sort out some stuff in the armory; some of Wolf's guys just dropped off some surplus rifles."

"Roger roger," Jason replied, slipping out from beneath Miyu's Arwing. "Just give me five minutes to finish up the wiring here, eh boss?"

Bill laughed at his new title. "Sure thing."

"Hey Bill," Slippy said, putting his datapad down and standing up in the cockpit. "Where's Sophie?"

"Up in the med bay, I think," Bill answered. "She's making dinner in a little while if you're interested."

Slippy brightened up a little, nodding enthusiastically. "Thanks! I just wanted to ask her something real quick."

"I'll join you for the meal," Jason piped up, looking back and forth between Slippy and Bill. "I won't even charge for my presence."

"Whoa now," Bill laughed. "What if we've only got food for three?"

Slippy sat back down in cockpit seat as Bill and Jason engaged in mock argument, beginning the process of saving the work on his datapad. He tried to resist looking up at Linka, even as he felt her eyes staring him down from her perch above him. Finally, as he powered his computer down and disconnected it from its leads, he glanced up at her, frowning with guilt under her reproachful gaze.

"I'm sorry," he said, closing the datapad's screen and collecting his tools from the floor of the cockpit. "But I have to."

* * *

The flames of re-entry faded away, allowing those inside the passenger shuttle to finally glimpse the endless, sparkling ocean that was Aquas.

Out of their tiny viewports, the passengers could see the surface stretch off towards the blurred horizon, where the dark blue of the sea met the light blue of the sky. Islands dotted the expanse, some too small to hold any life more than a tree or two, others large enough to support a co-existant colony of sentient and non sentient beings. Small gray specs grew into fishing boats and pleasure yachts as the shuttle descended, sprinkled between the islands like flowers in a garden. And all the while, Lylat's blazing star reflected off of every metal surface, from the shuttle wings to the boats below, creating a visually warming sensation for the passengers flying to Barrados, while simultaneously forcing them to squint through the blinding light.

The resort island came into view as the shuttle suddenly banked around, circling down for a landing. The tiny starport, consisting of no more than a half-dozen berths, was the first landmark visible amongst the blur of green vegetation and sun-scorched brick. As the transport approached, those inside could make out other public transit shuttles docked in some of the berths, as well as a larger, military transport painted in Cornerian green.

The shuttle reached its circular bay and hovered above the open ceiling for a moment, gathering information from starport control. While it did, a flock of small, exotic birds flew past the viewports, as if welcoming the passengers to the tropical paradise. The airborne parade of reds and yellows meshed with the white of the buildings, the green of the trees, and the blue of the ocean to create a cascade of color.

Finally, the shuttle received clearance, and slowly began dropping towards the dirt floor of the docking bay below. Hanger techs scurried this way and that, clearing forgotten equipment out of the way of the transport's dangerous jets. The tropical island slowly disappeared from the viewports, replaced instead by the brown and white of the hanger walls.

The craft settled down amidst a whirlwind of dirt and dust, buffeting the techs and mechanics waiting in the wings. In another moment the intense downward thrust came to an abrupt stop, and the dust began to settle. The shuttle's cargo pod disengaged from beneath the belly of the ship with a heavy _ka-chunk,_ lowering onto a wheeled slab rolled underneath by the starport workers. Even as the passenger cabin ramp deployed, disgorging the eager vacationers within, their luggage was wheeled around and waiting for them at the bottom.

One of the techs retrieving bags for the passengers was approached by a hard-faced jackal. After a brief exchange of words, the tech disappeared into the dumpster-sized cargo pod, reappearing a minute later with a duffel bag in hand. The tech passed the bag to the jackal with a smile, accepting a friendly handshake in return for his efforts. Nobody noticed the credit chip he then quickly tucked into his uniform pocket.

The jackal jogged to catch up with the rest of his party, exiting through the small tunnel to the rest of the island. They passed by signs and notices of local public policy and law, largely ignoring the friendly, prerecorded voices reminding them to report any suspicious activity to the starport authorities. Finally, they walked underneath a large welcome sign constructed from island woods and colored to match the wildlife, and emerged into the island paradise of Barrados.

For a moment, Fox just stood there, basking in the late afternoon sun cast down through the low rooftops and island trees around the tunnel exit. A cool breeze wafted up from the beach nearby, pushing through his orange fur in tiny lines. The calls of a tropical bird sounded from somewhere, followed by the distant sound of strings and local music. For a moment, Fox forgot all about the mission, Wolf, Bauker...everything. His sharp senses dulled down to a faint hum, save the gritty feel of the dirt beneath his boots and the quiet roar of the ocean in his ears.

Fox flashed a grin at his friends, an expression reflected in all of their faces without exception. This was paradise.

The open-top taxi ride to their lodgings was no less scenic. The soft growl of the vehicle's hybrid engine accompanied what for all intents and purposes was a tour to their bungalow on the far side of the island. The streets were lined with vendors and open walled shops selling all sorts of beach gear and handcrafted goods. Restaurant balconies and outdoor seating areas were full of vacationers, running the gambit from couples to packs of young adults; retirees, families, and every age in between. Green palmed trees lined the roads, growing alongside and occasionally into the worn, white scorched buildings.

Between every block, they could see the blue ocean down the side streets, beckoning them towards it. Falco's whistle made a group of women in swimwear and towels laugh out loud as the taxi passed, only causing the avian's grin to grow wider. The driver turned down another street, and the buildings began to thin out a little, giving way to wooden structures, one of which the vehicle slowed down and came to a stop in front of.

The group piled out of the taxi, retrieving their bags as they took in their surroundings. Their bungalow was built into a patch of trees with the front door opening inland towards the rest of the island. Other wooden structures dotted the street, strategically placed by landlords to be far enough away for privacy, while close enough for a sense of security. The omnipresent ocean breeze blew from the direction of the hut, carrying with it the scent of salt and sand.

Hartford approached the automaton standing on the porch by the front door, attesting that himself and the group were indeed the owners of the hut for the next two days. As the droid reported that nobody had trespassed while it had been waiting for the group to arrive, Fox fished a credit chip from his pocket, tossing it to Miyu and pointing at the taxi driver. The lynx looked at him strange for a moment before Fox put up his thumbs and forefingers, making a box around his face and mouthing the word 'bounty.'

"Ah," Miyu said with understanding. "Right."

The lynx approached the driver, who was facing away from her at the wheel of his vehicle. A smirk tugged at her lips as she saw that he was staring at Katt through the side mirror, standing on her toes to retrieve her bag from the luggage compartment.

Miyu cleared her throat, raising an eyebrow when the driver whipped his head around and saw her standing next to his door. She offered the credit chip like a policeman offering a ticket to someone who should know better. The driver cleared his own throat in embarrassment, taking the chip and muttering a word of thanks before engaging the vehicle's engine and driving off. With a sigh, the lynx figured that she had stumbled across what would probably become a common theme over the next day or two.

Hartford completed the check-in process with the droid, beckoning the group into the bungalow as the robot stomped off down the road.

The hut was sparse and constructed entirely of the thin, porous wood that was everywhere on the island. A small communal room, just large enough for a sofa on one side and a few chairs and a table on the other, took up half of the building, with a hallway stretching through the other half towards the back door. A half-dozen tiny bedrooms sprouted off from the hallway, three on each side, with curtains for doors. A few portable lamps sat on the table, but otherwise, the hut was utterly barren of decoration or luxury; perfect for a low-key, isolated little vacation. Perfect for what the mercenaries needed.

Katt squeezed through the group standing in the main room, taking in what little there was to take in about the bungalow. Out the screened back door, she could clearly see the sparkling ocean and inviting sands beyond; their own, semi-private beach, shared with the other bungalows along their gravel road.

Her scream put the island animals to shame.

"Oh my god!" she squealed, grabbing Miyu's hand and sprinting for the back door, a confused and slightly alarmed lynx in tow. "C'mon, we've only got a few hours of sun!"

* * *

Solar lingered on the horizon for another hour or two before finally succumbing and plunging the island of Barrados into a soft night. However, in its wake, Lylat's star left a glow of purples and reds and golds in the Aquas sky, matching the earthy glow of torches and the buzzing illumination of neon lights scattered about the island. Beaches gradually cleared out – save for those looking to lose themselves in the peacefulness of the dark – funneling their occupants into the clubs and nightlife of the central buildings on the island. And even as the glowing sky slowly settled to a uniform, blackish blue, the ever present ocean breeze filtered through every window, every tree, and everyone.

Leaning over the front porch railing of the team's bungalow, hidden from the starlight by the shadow of the overhang, Miyu could hear the distant sounds of club patrons shouting and screaming from further down the road. On their street though, the coast was clear, both literally and figuratively. The lynx had just gotten back from checking the beach side of the hut, getting an "all clear" from Rhena, the other person unlucky enough to pull the first shift of guard duty. While the two of them stood on watch, most of the rest of the team slept, having spent the day relaxing and preparing for the meeting to come the following morning.

The roar of the ocean waves crashing against the beach had already become white noise to Miyu, but every once in awhile the sound sneaked back into her consciousness. The rhythm was soothing, lulling her into a sense of comfort and safety that she realized was potentially dangerous.

It was just as she was pondering the implications of such a false sense of security that a distant conversation separated itself from the hollers of the club goers. It was quiet at first, barely discernible, but steadily grew until Miyu could make out the owners of the voices, and soon, individual words. Her initial instinct to seek cover dissolved, however, when the pair came into view walking down the road, and she easily recognized one of them by both voice and saunter.

"Oh?" Katt's playful voice intoned. "And how do you think you'll manage that, hon?"

"I'll find a way," a male voice replied, coming from the silhouette Miyu didn't recognize. A gruff laugh followed. "I always find a way."

Miyu watched the boisterous pair approach her porch, the silhouettes gradually coalescing into the familiar outline of Katt, and a hulking wolf who, based on his clothing, was one of the clubbers the lynx had been listening to all night. They both wobbled a little as they walked, using each other to stay upright, though Katt clearly looked to be the worse off of the pair. Even ten meters off, Miyu could smell the alcohol on the breeze, sweet and enticing at first, but very quickly becoming overwhelming and suffocating.

Separating the two in a few moments was a task Miyu wasn't excited about, given the wolf's substantial build. Why Katt was even out this late was another matter to deal with entirely; she and Falco had left the bungalow several hours ago together on a 'scouting' excursion. Nobody believed them, of course, but they were clearly both eager to sample the night life, and it was better to let them go with knowledge of their activities than to risk having them duck out in the middle of their watch rotation.

Miyu relaxed a little as she heard a faint rustle from the trees nearby. Rhena had apparently heard the pair approaching. The female wolf's hidden presence made the lynx feel better about what was to come.

"Evening you two," Miyu spoke up when they were a few meters away from the porch steps.

Katt squeaked and they both stopped in their tracks, as though they had just heard a disembodied voice. Miyu realized quickly that, from their point of view they just had, and stepped out of the overhang's shadow onto the porch's first step.

"Miyu!" Katt exclaimed a little louder than necessary as the lynx stepped into the starlight. She bounced towards her spotted friend and nearly lost her footing on the steps, stumbling into an embrace. Miyu's expression turned both amused and concerned as she found herself supporting the pink feline's weight, her nostrils assaulted by the stench of sweat and booze.

"Miyu!" Katt repeated, just as loud as she untangled herself and pointed back at the wolf. She seemed to realize her volume was set too high though, and quieted herself to a shouted whisper. "He plays center for the Aquas planetary team!"

"Oh yeah? Center?" Miyu said, raising an eyebrow. The amused half of her expression shone through in her tone of voice. She looked at the lupine at the bottom of the steps. "What sport would that be?"

The wolf's grin flashed in the low light as he shrugged. "Does it matter?"

Miyu laughed, rolling her eyes. She patted Katt on her bare shoulder, gently directing her towards the screen door. "Okay kitty, in you go. Sleep it off."

"Mm, okeedokee," the feline hummed, nearly tripping again as she stumbled along the porch. She found the door handle and looked back at her escort, waving. "Thanks for the walk, sweetie!"

The wolf was already halfway up the stairs when he stopped, blocked by Katt's words and Miyu's presence.

"Road's behind you, _sweetie_," Miyu intoned, staring down at the lupine.

He stared back with menace in his eyes, as though he had been denied a prize, and Miyu suddenly found herself very aware of the holdout pistol strapped to her thigh, under her beach skirt. She didn't want to use it of course, but as he took another step and she instinctively took one in retreat, her hesitation was quickly drying up. The air was suddenly heavy with something, poisoned by the blend of alcohol and cheap cologne.

The wolf only made it one more step though, before he was suddenly laying in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, a red and orange haired member of his species standing over him. Miyu breathed a mental sigh of relief as the man struggled to pick himself up, coughing and wheezing as he wondered aloud what had just happened. The lynx made her way down the stairs to stand beside Rhena, crossing her arms and trying to look as intimidating as she was sure the taller female wolf looked.

The would-be suitor finally managed to gain his feet, glaring at his attacker with something approaching anger but held back by a good amount of caution.

"The hell's your deal?" he shouted, wavering a bit. He looked past them at the bungalow door, taking a step forward and raising his voice. "Katt, your friends-"

The rasp of a knife leaving its sheath stopped him cold. The long blade flashed in the starlight, quickly hidden behind Rhena's arm as she stood still, acting as though she hadn't done anything. Almost immediately after, the quiet _click _of a small pistol priming sounded just as loudly in the wolf's ears. Miyu held the holdout weapon in her hands folded at the small of her back, remembering that firearms were illegal on the island. She was confident to the fact that the implication of the pistol was enough to deter him.

"Road's be_hind _you," she repeated, resisting the urge to gesture with the gun.

Like a hunter ambushed by more than he bargained for, the wolf retreated a step, glancing rapidly back and forth at the girls in front of him. He muttered something under his breath before taking one last, longing look at the bungalow, and turning around. His gait was significantly steadier than before, the exchange having brought some sobriety to his addled mind.

The pair watched him disappear down the road, waiting until his silhouette dissolved into the darkness before glancing at each other. Miyu's eyes had adjusted to the low light enough to see the barely perceptible nod of approval from Rhena. Without word, the female wolf turned and melted back into the trees around the bungalow, resuming her watch on the opposite side of the structure.

Breathing out the tension of the situation, Miyu reactivated the safety of her weapon and slipped it back into the band around her thigh. She climbed the steps of the porch, resuming her previous position just as she heard another pair of footfalls making their way down the road.

For a split second she thought the wolf was coming back for more, but she recognized their rhythm, and the taller, thinner silhouette that appeared shortly thereafter. Their other lost 'scout' had returned.

Falco approached with a similarly uneven step, though his gait was more leisurely. The breeze carried with it a faint, whistled tune, along with scents similar to the wolf who had just left. He lifted an arm and waved at the bungalow when he was several meters out, though if he actually knew Miyu was there watching him or if he did it for another reason the lynx couldn't be sure. His features gradually resolved in the low light, revealing an avian who was significantly worse for the wear of the night.

"Good god," Miyu couldn't help but quip as he reached the bottom of the steps. "The hell happened to you?"

Falco stopped midstep, looking up at the shadow cast by the overhang in confusion. Rather than try to make out who was talking to him, he merely shrugged, lifting a hand to his bruised face. A small, dried rivulet of blood leaked from his ear, and a dark spot surrounded his eye.

"Got in a tussle," he told the darkness, continuing his ascent until he was literally face to face with the lynx at the top. "Oh, hey Miyu."

She laughed, noticing a good amount of the makeup he had borrowed from Katt to hide his identity had been wiped off by something. "And your mascara's running, too. Sounds like a good night."

"Oh, it was," Falco grinned, looking at the dried makeup on his hands. "Can't say her boyfriend felt the same way." He looked at her. "Thus, the tussle."

Miyu rolled her eyes, still smiling. "Well, grab some insta-caf and take a seat," she said, reaching for the screen door. "You're up for guard duty with Aush."

"Aush?" Falco asked, slurring the name. "But who'll I have to talk to?"

"Not my problem," Miyu said over her shoulder as the screen door shut behind her. "Aush has the back door. Caf's on the counter. Fox and Crendon'll take over in three hours."

Falco sighed, accepting his fate as he took a seat on the top step of the porch, leaning back on his hands and letting his head loll back. The darkness of the overhang above covered his vision, allowing memories of his night to slip into the forefront of his mind. A small smile began creeping over his lips as the night's events cycled by, and he eased himself gently onto his back, still staring into the black corners of the overhang. The ocean's rhythmic roar became his white noise, and the wood planks of the porch were surprisingly comfortable.

An hour later, Aush stood over the dozing avian, staring down at him. The marine toed Falco's chest, tapping it twice and waiting for a reaction. When none came, he lightly tapped Falco's head with his sandal, a motion met only by a loud snore of disapproval from the dozing mercenary.

A huff of amusement came from the silhouetted marine, followed shortly by the sound of him casually descending the porch steps. The rough scrapes of his footfalls on the graveled road gradually faded into the night as he left the bungalow, headed towards the hoots and hollers of the Barrados nightlife.

* * *

Her sigh sent shivers down his spine.

The small maintenance closet was just large enough for the cot that had been placed in there some time ago, next to the various racks of tools and supplies that gave the room its purpose. It was dark, lit only by an old, portable lamp that sat on the floor, casting a low, orange-tinted light up at the closet's occupants. A quick cleaning had taken place once it had been decided that the room would serve as the quarters for the _Great Fox's _resident engaged couple, and all of the more dangerous tools and materials had been removed, but it still smelled and felt like a tiny, often ignored room, used sparingly.

As Bill lay on his back, he realized that wouldn't have had it any other way.

The confined space made the room intimate; the flickering light made it inviting. And _she_ made it a home.

Bill looked down at the canine laying half on top of him under the covers of the cot. He could feel her breath soft on his chest as their pulses began to slow, feel her comforting weight on his body as her muscles gently tensed and relaxed. He found himself unable to keep a hand from finding its way to her hair, gently stroking it as she sighed again, soft and carefree. She snuggled closer, her pointed ear pressed against his breastbone as she pushed into the crook of his arm, hearing every reassuring beat of his heart as it settled with hers. Soon their breathing fell into a relaxed rhythm, the precursor to a long, entirely peaceful sleep.

"Have I told you lately that I love you?" Bill said, breaking the majestic quietness of the room with a smile.

"Mm," Sophie hummed, refusing to open her eyes or budge in any way from the fiance-nest she had found for herself. "You know, you have. But I love hearing it."

"Well, I don't want to waste it then," he smirked. "Can only say it so many times a day, you know."

Sophie huffed a laugh, parting one eye to look at him with fake admonishment. "Oh yeah?"

"Yep," Bill replied, lifting the arm Sophie wasn't laying on behind his head. "And what would happen if I needed to use it for a really romantic moment or something?"

This time the chestnut canine looked at him with both eyes, picking her head off his chest. A beat of silence played out before they both started laughing softly, pausing for a quick kiss before Sophie put her head back down.

Their quiet presence filled the maintenance closet for another few minutes, their eyelids slowly growing heavier as the late hour of the night made itself known. The hum of the _Great Fox_'s internal machinations created the perfect lullaby, and his fiance made the perfect blanket. Bill found himself creeping up to the edge of sleep when Sophie spoke up again.

"I was thinking about Slippy," she said with gentle concern.

Bill laughed once, keeping his tired eyes closed. "Really? Soap, if I'm _that _bad, you could just tell me. I'll try harder."

Sophie picked her head up again, smiling and rolling her eyes. "You know what I mean." She propped her chin on her palm, looking down at her near-dozing hound as she lay half atop him. "He asked me something interesting today."

"Mm," Bill intoned, nestling into the pillow and rubbing her bare back with his pinned arm. "Do tell."

"It was after you and Jason took his stuff to the armory," she began, a slight look of confusion on her features. "He came up to me in the med bay, looking kinda unsure of himself."

"Sounds about right so far," Bill quipped.

"He asked me how I was doing, and it seemed like we were having a good conversation when he just kind of blurted out something about 'trauma' and whether or not I knew anything about a 'fractured consciousness.' It was the strangest thing."

"A 'fractured consciousness'," the hound repeated distantly.

"Yeah. Asked whether it was possible if a part of your mind could start acting on its own. Start thinking without the rest of the mind knowing about it."

"Mm."

"He was really specific, too," Sophie continued. "Kept saying he had heard about cases where people would talk to themselves, believing they were talking to someone who didn't actually exist. You know, like a ghost only they could see or something. He kept looking behind me, too, like there was someone there."

She paused, gazing off into space.

"I dunno; maybe I'm just reading into things too much, but I think he might be having some mental problems." She shook her head, looking back at her lover. "What do you think?"

Bill didn't say anything. A few moments dragged on.

"Sweetie?"

A loud snore rumbled from his muzzle.

"Bill!" she said, slapping his chest.

"Hu-what?" he sputtered, lifting his head up for a moment before realizing where he was. His head hit the pillow again, humming an apology. "I'm sorry, babe; guess I dozed off there."

"Really, would it kill you to listen to me spill for a few minutes?" she said accusingly.

"I know, I know, I'm a terrible fiance," Bill replied sleepily, holding her tighter and giving her a kiss on the forehead. "Tell you what, tell me all about it over some caf tomorrow morning. I'm useless right now."

Sophie sighed, snuggling closer to him and letting her head fall again into the crook of his arm and shoulder. Though she wanted to say more, the canine suddenly felt the comforting warmth of his body below and the cot's covers above her. She failed to suppress a yawn, yielding herself to the pull of sweet, sweet slumber.

"Fine," she said just before nodding off. "But you're brewing it."

* * *

"The Black Star shines at midnight."

The man stared at Aush for a few moments, looking up from the newspaper he was inexplicably reading by the light of a nearby nightclub. He sat at a wicker table on a cafe's outdoor promenade, apparently oblivious to the fact that the establishment had closed many hours ago, and that he was surrounded by empty tables and chairs. The man was older than most out at that hour of the night, though a certain sharpness showed through his weary eyes and grizzled features.

"Then you best find shade," the man replied, gesturing over his shoulder as he returned to his paper. "They're expecting you."

Aush glanced in the direction the man gestured, noticing the alley that ran behind the neon lights and jostling line of patrons of the nightclub's facade. Without a word, he left the old man to his paper, and made his way towards the space between the closed cafe and the club, careful to look as nonchalant as possible. A bouncer stood at the alley entrance, but Aush kept his eyes forward and walked by without slowing down, and the heavily muscled guard never looked twice.

He reached the rusted metal door, stopping in front of it and rapping on it twice with his knuckles. For a few moments, nothing happened. Aush looked around, noticing the surprising proximity of the ocean down at the alley terminus, its characteristic roar entirely drowned out by the thumping bass and loud patrons of the club. The alley lacked the grit and grime of its modern city counterparts, replaced instead by parched brick and lightweight wood.

The door finally opened, revealing the utterly uninterested face of a hired guard. He beckoned Aush in, allowing the marine entry into the back rooms of the club.

The pounding bass jumped several notches as Aush followed his escort through the dark, narrow corridors of the club's rear. He managed to catch a few glimpses of the dance floor, quick images of a packed crowd from behind one way mirrors. At least one guard stood at each of the 'windows', surveying the jostling, writhing dance floor for one thing or another. Aush could only guess what they were doing as he followed the doorman further into the club's back rooms. The number of similarly dressed guards suddenly increased, standing at every hallway intersection and every doorway.

Finally, Aush's escort stopped in front of a heavy metal door, equipped with a closeable slit at eye level and flanked on both sides by men in suits. They had their hands folded in front of them, but Aush didn't find it hard to imagine they were packing easily reachable weapons somewhere in their fashionable island materials.

One of the suited men knocked on the door, the hollow _thumps _momentarily competing with the muffled club music.

The slit opened, and just as quickly closed. There was a heavy _thunk _as the locking mechanism disengaged, followed by the vault door swinging inward on smooth, noiseless hinges. Aush's original escort disappeared down the way they had come as the new doorman took over, his neutral stare drawing Aush into the secure room.

The marine stepped in to the well appointed office, pausing to take it in as the doorman performed a quick pat down for weapons. The handful of desks and chairs were made of heavy, off-world wood, polished to a fine sheen in the low light cast off by the lamps. A haze of smoke filled the room, combining with the low illumination to give it a slightly claustrophobic feel. Besides the doorman, there were few more guards with unamused expressions, watching the weapons check with casual disinterest. Around them, at most of the desks, clerks of some sort were bent over their work, some of them wrestling with papers and digital clipboards, others busy manipulating powders and pills with what looked like medical utensils.

The doorman pulled Aush's pistol and place it in his own jacket, nodding at one of the guards standing nearby.

"Sir," the guard called, turning towards the desk at the far end of the medium sized room. "Mr. Silver has arrived."

The chair behind the desk swiveled around, revealing a wolf studying a datapad, one hand holding the device and other supporting his chin. A cigar hung from his lips, trailing a thin wisp of smoke as he set the datapad down and removed it from his mouth.

He was youngish, at least compared to the office he was occupying; old enough to have clout and respect within his organization, but youthful enough to retain the sort of vitality necessary to run a field operation. A shock of blond hair dominated the top of his head, and a distinctive white mask of fur stretched between his eyes. His dress was roughly similar to that of the guards, though with a few personal flairs that made it clear that, as the highest ranking officer present, he got to call the shots.

"Mr. Silver," Richard Keelik said evenly, lifting an eyebrow at the pseudonym. "I received your message earlier today; I was beginning to think you wouldn't show up. Now, you mentioned something urgent?" Just as Aush began to reply, the wolf cut him off. "And I'll remind you that not many people get to see this room. If your info isn't worth the risk I took bringing you here, you might as well pull up a chair, because you won't leave."

Aush stared at Keelik for a moment, making sure the wolf was truly done speaking before daring to attempt to reply again. After he felt he could speak, he did so clearly and simply.

"Star Fox is here in Barrados."

* * *

**A/N**:

Hopefully y'all didn't forget about Mr. Keelik. If you did, no worries, check out the first bit of chapter 20 for a quick refresher. Jeez, I sound like a teacher. Alright, on to the reviews...

**northernmegas:** Ah! Ace Combat. I remember those games. Haven't played any of the recent ones, but three and four were excellent if I remember correctly. Peppy's recording was made just before the start of this story (thus the cheeky line "your past self should be arriving back from Riley around now..."). And the wedding took place somewhere unknown to the reader; the "Trust your instincts" line was supposed to be Fox remembering Peppy's signature phrase. Sorry if I messed up the layout of that. Finally, Fara. She may pop up down the road, she may not. I honestly haven't thought about it yet. This fic's got plenty of legs left though, even as we round the two-thirds marker. I guess we'll find out. Thanks for the review!

**chaos Leader**: I'll admit, I do get caught up with the actiony bits of the story, to the point of neglecting actual plot and character development. I just really, really like writing action :) And thank you for those kind words. Hopefully this chapter lived up to the standard of the last!

**AndrossKenobi:** Thanks for the review! I guess we'll see what happens with those two; authors _have_ been known to changes their minds mid story...or not.

**LilGstryker**: Ah, I'm glad to hear it; Miyu's such a blank slate of a character in the canon that I wasn't sure if readers would like the angle I was going with. Hopefully she holds up in the chapters to come. Thanks for the review!

**RedBay**: Nah, never apologize for the rambling. Wouldn't have it any other way! But that story idea is an interesting one. I'm sure you would make a great author if you ever decided to open up a word doc and have a go at it. But I'm happy you enjoyed that particular scene. I actually had to go back and see what Peppy "sounded" like through his mannerisms, it had been so long since I wrote for him. But if emotion was conveyed properly, then I'll consider it a win :) Thanks for the review, buddy.

**The Frustrated**:Thank you; your analysis of Miyu is dead on for what I was going for. A loner who is discovering for the first time what it means to be in a "family." And I'm glad to hear the time scale worked out. I know I was getting fairly impatient with myself in getting her character development rolling a few times, so I'm glad it turned out okay. Thanks for the review!

Okay; that's me. As always, thank you for reading my story, and please, feel free to leave a review with any critiques or comments you might have.

-Redd


	38. Chapter 38: Coral Sun

**XXXVIII: **Coral Sun

* * *

The _Coral Sun _was a nice little restaurant, Fox had to give it that.

Constructed of the same island wood as nearly every other non-brick building on Barrados, the eatery's high, pointed roof combined with its dangling, slowly rotating ceiling fans to give it an airy, soothing quality. A small, unattended bar occupied one corner of the floorspace, with the rest of it filled by a mix of a couple dozen or so booths and tables. The walls were mostly solid wood, with gaps every so often for windows. The back and front doors were open, allowing the refreshing ocean breeze to float through; the morning sun was still climbing in the sky, and the outdoor temperature had hit the sweet spot between cool and warm.

From his booth against the wall, Fox lowered his newspaper and surveyed the scene for what felt like the thousandth time.

The dining room was mostly empty, with only three other tables occupied besides his own. In another booth nearby, a family sat enjoying their breakfast; Fox smirked as the youngest child made another face at him before she was quickly disciplined by the hushed words of her parents.

A young couple sat at a table at the opposite side of the room, silent for almost the entire time they had been in the restaurant, though their hostile glares at each other told more than any overheard words could. A waitress had just delivered their food, giving them a desperately needed focus for their attention, the beach-themed art pieces on the walls having apparently run their course. Fox managed to catch the server rolling her eyes as she returned to the kitchen.

Finally, he turned his attention to the center of the room, where a group of tables sat in a depressed, circular portion of the wooden floor, set a few steps lower than the rest of the dining room. There, a round table set for four was occupied by a man and a woman, both hares, in formal island clothes, both of them sitting with the sort of rigid attentiveness that only comes from a life in the military. They had been in the restaurant since Fox sat down thirty minutes ago and started his reconnaissance, leaving the mercenary to conclude that one of them was the informant in question, the other most likely a bodyguard of some sort.

Right on cue, a pair of men in equally formal yet comfortable island shirts appeared at the eatery's entrance. Fox watched them as they made their way to the round table's empty seats, raising an eyebrow when the informant started laughing.

"Hartford?" the male hare said, laughing with a mix of relief and disbelief. "Hartford! What the hell are you doing here?"

"I could ask the same thing, Bishop," Hartford replied as he took his seat. The husky was conflicted in tone, happy to see an old friend, but wary of the fact that if Bishop was the informant, it meant he had at least gone along with Admiral Gage's betrayal for a while. It was a good thing that he intended to defect, but Hartford couldn't shake the idea that the hare was at least partially responsible for leaving the captain and his _Broadsword _to die.

Commander Bishop saw the concern in Hartford's face. "No, seriously; I really didn't want to believe that you died on that hulk, but that's what I heard. How did you get-"

"Don't worry about it, Bishop," Hartford said, deflecting the question.

"You're our contact then," Crendon interjected, glancing first at the Commander and then the female hare.

"Lieutenant Thorne," she introduced herself, nodding as an implicit handshake. She looked back and forth between Hartford and Crendon, her reservation about them just barely perceptible. "So, beautiful day, eh?"

Crendon looked through the open door behind them, feeling the ocean breeze wafting through. It was another sunny, perfect day on the beaches without a cloud in the sky. "It is; shame about the rain though," he replied, giving the pass phrase agreed upon through Warlord Siona.

"You didn't have to do that Sarah," Bishop remarked, still smiling. "I knew Hartford here back when this whole mess was just starting. Never could think of a reason to doubt him."

"Just following procedure, sir," Lieutenant Thorne replied, taking a sip of her coffee.

"So, hopefully you've got some security around here," Bishop continued, turning back to Hartford and Crendon. "As you may have noticed, we, er, don't."

Hartford resisted the urge to glance at Fox, sitting behind his newspaper in the corner. "We'll be fine," he replied, taking solace in the fact that the mercenaries were nearby. He raised an eyebrow. "But why no security of your own?"

"Well, that's a bit of a side effect of how I figured things would go," the hare answered, scratching his head. He gestured at his lieutenant. "See, aside from Sarah here, the rest of the crew who want to go along with this are back on the _Hauberk_, prepping her for a quick getaway. Or as quick as a cruiser can get away, anyway. Everyone else is down here somewhere on the beaches for their scheduled leave."

"How much of your crew is willing to defect with you?" Crendon asked.

"A skeleton shift, to be sure," Bishop said, twisting his lips a little. "Maybe two dozen crew and a handful of support staff. Not what I'd consider ideal, but the cruiser will run until we can find more to fill in the gaps."

"What if they're Lord O'Donnell's men?" Crendon continued. "Your Admiral Gage's raid on our base left a lot of crewmen without billets."

"That will work," Bishop answered. "Besides, I understand if O'Donnell wants some sort of guarantee of our sincerity. If that means we take some of his crew in, then that works for me."

Hartford watched as Crendon nodded, satisfied with the answer Bishop provided. A slight shiver ran up the Lieutenant's spine however, something Hartford noticed out of the corner of his eye. Combined with her slightly sour expression, it seemed to be a visible disapproval of Bishop's trust of Wolf O'Donnell.

"And what will you want in return?" Hartford questioned, directing his words at Lieutenant Thorne.

"Sanctuary against Admiral Gage and Bauker's alliance," she replied, her deadpan attitude not lifting at all. "And a promise of autonomy in battlefield situations."

"Autonomy?" Hartford repeated, raising an eyebrow.

"Captain Hartford, I'm sure when you joined up with Wolf O'Donnell's forces you had some hesitation with the idea of being ordered around by them. After everything..." Thorne trailed off, glancing at Crendon. Her eyes lingered on him, as if holding the jackal himself responsible for Star Wolf's actions during the Lylat War. "..._They _did to us."

Hartford nodded, remembering how he had insisted on Star Fox's presence at the meeting for that very reason.

Bishop spoke up, finishing for his lieutenant. "We realize that O'Donnell holds the best chance to strike back at Bauker and Gage, especially since going to High Command is out of the question.

"Why?"

"Admiral Gage has plants in Cornerian Intelligence," Bishop answered. "They'll know right away if we try to get Markiss' attention with this. It's not hard to imagine that they'd be able to cook up a nice little evidence drop to discredit me and anyone else who's with me."

Hartford nodded. The restaurant's waitress walked past them at that moment, and the husky tracked her with his eyes, noticing her gait. She seemed hurried somehow, walking with a purpose that itself wasn't unusual for one of her profession. However, her lack of a serving tray or plates of food to match her stride struck him as odd.

Crendon had picked up the conversation while Hartford mentally shook off the distracting thought and returned his attention to the matter at hand. Wolf's marine had inquired about the Cornerians' motivation in defecting.

"Why else does anybody ever defect?" Bishop replied, shrugging as though the answer was obvious. "Ideological differences. Turns out Bauker's call for an 'independent Lylat' is no different from Andross'. The message is sound, and I've no love for a Cornerian hegemony, but Bauker's using the message to cover up the fact that this coup against Corneria is destined to end with him in charge."

"And Admiral Gage?" Crendon asked.

"What about him?" Bishop replied. He shook his head, his tone dropping to a somber level. "When I joined the Cornerian Navy as a lieutenant, I believed every recruiting poster and every smiling politician's word. I thought Corneria was Lylat's 'beacon of prosperity' and all that jazz. After the Lylat War, I saw how Corneria placed itself as Lylat's reigning super power, touting benevolence while subtly inserting itself into every planet's politics. Admiral Gage saw this too, and when he contacted me in private about joining Bauker, I agreed wholeheartedly."

"But unlike Gage, I can see the lesser evil of Corneria against Bauker. I can see that this Warlord is no better than Andross, complete with his own shady research projects and personal agendas." Bishop looked at Crendon. "Does Project Afterlife ring a bell to you?"

Crendon shook his head no, but Hartford nodded, the husky's features suddenly sharpening as he flashed back to the _Broadsword_.

"Then you know what Bauker's willing to do to achieve his goals." Bishop sighed, his voice lightening a little. "Corneria isn't a saint, but neither is the Warlord, and if Admiral Gage can't see that, then why follow him off a cliff?"

The Lieutenant followed up with further reasons, but Hartford didn't pay attention. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the waitress talking to the family at the booth near Fox. Her back was to the husky and he couldn't make out the words she was saying, but when it looked like the father of the family was reaching for his wallet, the waitress shook her head and waved him off. As she returned to the kitchen, the family moved to leave, filing out of their booth and walking with confused expressions towards the beach door.

Hartford's mind clicked, and he turned in his chair, looking behind him. The young, awkwardly silent couple were gone too, their food still sitting half eaten on their table.

His head snapped around, his expression carrying enough concern to halt the conversation cold. His eyes met Fox's, the vulpine's face mirroring his own from across the room.

"I hope we're not intruding," a new voice said from the street door.

* * *

"I could get used to this," Katt sighed, turning onto her stomach and stretching on her towel.

_'No argument here,' _Miyu thought, rubbing her back into her own towel a little.

The girls had staked out a spot on the beach behind the _Coral Sun, _joining the dozens of other sunbathers hoping to catch the gentle rays of the morning light, before Solar rose too high in the sky. The sand stretched off in both directions, with the larger hotels and restaurants down one way, and the quiet back doors of private bungalows and cottages the other way. Their spot marked the middle ground between the two, with enough foot traffic to justify a small time eatery like the _Sun_, but nothing close to the crowded shores of the major resorts.

Miyu brushed her fingers through the sand, eyes closed behind her sunglasses. The warm, coarse texture contrasted beautifully with the smooth breeze coming off the waves as they lapped against the shore. Idly pushing underneath the sand, her fingertips quickly met the cooler earth beneath the top layer. It was nearly enough to make her forget about the whole reason she and Katt were laying there on the beach in the first place. Almost enough to distract her from what the rest of the team was doing at the moment. She withdrew her fingers, exposing them again to the soft sun as excess sand ran through them. Almost.

"So why did Foxie tell us to hang out back here?" Katt mused, bracing her chin on a palm and glancing over at Miyu. She giggled. "Not that I'm complaining, mind you. It's just that _before_ we were going to get our luggage and meet them at the starport."

"He said he wanted us nearby," Miyu answered, her eyes still closed. "I guess Hartford caught Aush skipping out on his watch last night. He wasn't gone long, but Fox seemed to think it was a little suspicious. S'why Fox didn't tell Aush or Crendon we're here."

"Just because the soldier wanted a little rest and relaxation in town?" Katt said skeptically. "I always thought Fox was a little uptight, but that's just a little too much. I mean, why not be suspicious of _me _then? I was enjoying life last night, too."

"You?" Miyu asked.

"Yeah. What makes Aush suspicious for wanting to have a little fun and not Falco? Or me? _I _could be scheming some sort of secret plot against the boys, you know."

Miyu barely resisted the urge to laugh in Katt's face at the idea that she could plan any sort of coup against Fox's team. Instead she settled for a wide grin as she strained and sat up, finally opening her eyes. She glanced around, taking in the sights and sounds of the beach as Katt continued to speak.

"I just think that Foxie gets paranoid sometimes, you know? I get the feeling that the poor guy thinks the whole system's after him."

"It kinda is," Miyu replied, stretching her neck and looking behind them towards the _Coral Sun_. "With that bounty he's got, I'm surprised..."

"Psh," Katt dismissed her, waving her hand and letting her head sink back onto the towel. "You guys make such a big deal of those. I mean, Falco even borrowed some of my makeup last night because he was scared people would recognize him. Can you believe that? At least it wasn't as bad as that time back on Shoana." The feline stopped, finally realizing that Miyu had trailed off and never finished her last sentence. She looked up at the lynx again. "Miyu? What's wrong?"

"Rhena."

"Be more specific hon, she's got all sorts of things-"

"No, I mean she's gone."

"Hm?" Katt followed Miyu's gaze, looking at the restaurant's back entrance.

The feline remembered the fire-haired wolf standing casually – or as casually as Rhena could act – by the back door, leaning against the wooden walls as though waiting for someone. Katt had winced when she saw that the wolf still had her flight suit on; it was no way for a girl to dress at the beach. The feline knew Rhena was there acting as a guard of some sort, but other than her fashion misstep, Katt hadn't paid much attention to her presence behind the two sunbathing girls.

Now when she looked, the wolf was absent.

"Maybe she had to go to the bathroom?" Katt offered.

"No," Miyu said resolutely. "She left her knife behind."

Katt looked at the lynx and then back at the restaurant. She lifted her sunglasses and squinted, barely able to make out what looked like a small black stick poking out of the sand by the corner of the building, just before the beach ran out and the alley between the _Coral Sun _and the next structure over began.

"So?"

"Something's definitely wrong," Miyu finished, moving to stand up. "C'mon."

* * *

"I hope we're not intruding."

Fox's pulse spiked as the man strode through the front door, flanked by a pair of men who quickly drew pistols as they came in. The wolf looked familiar, though Fox couldn't quite put a finger on who he was in the moments following his entrance.

The vulpine gently eased his hand under the table of his booth, keeping his eyes on the newcomers to the restaurant. The three of them seemed more concerned with those sitting at the table in the middle of the room. The brush of gunmetal on his fingertips began pumping adrenelene into Fox's veins. His hand gripped the handle of his sidearm, tucked into his shorts and hidden by the loose island shirt. The stubby silencer on the weapon wouldn't last long, but if he could squeeze off a few shots...

The sound of struggling footsteps and a slightly feminine grunt of effort snapped Fox's head towards the beach side doorway, just in time to catch Rhena being pushed through the threshold. Another trio of men, armed with the same silenced pistols, followed her in, closing the door behind them. The Cornerian pilot stayed on her feet, quickly taking stock of the situation in the _Coral Sun _and apparently concluding that resistance wouldn't be wise at the moment.

When Fox turned back to the original speaker, the vulpine found himself staring down the enlongated barrel of the man's handgun from across the dining room.

"Kindly put your hand back on the table, Fox McCloud," the wolf said with a smirk.

Fox did as he was told, never breaking eye contact with the man as he slowly placed his palms face down on the table of his booth. They stared each other down for a moment, neither willing to be the first to turn away for any reason. However, Fox was destined to loose the silent fight, as a second body was propelled through the street door behind the wolf.

Falco was pushed through the doorway much the same way Rhena had moments before; unlike the female wolf, however, he was less graceful in his entrance, and tripped to the ground after a couple steps. Behind him, another pair of mundanely dressed men entered the eatery, followed by Aush, who closed the front door behind him.

Fox had to process Aush's casual demeanor for a moment before it became clear that the niggling sense of danger in the back of his mind that morning was true after all. The mercenary saw Hartford glance his way, and he locked eyes with the husky. Under less strenuous circumstances, Fox could almost hear the captain saying 'I told you so.'

"Hey, you're that Keelik jackass from Corneria," Falco said from the floor, sounding like a child who had just recognized a local celebrity in the street. "Black Star, right?"

One of the guards grabbed the avian by his shirt and sent him sliding down towards the center table. He skidded to a stop by Hartford's chair, unharmed but apparently unwilling to make a further quip. Crendon stood up from the table, glaring daggers at his subordinate as the traitorous husky stood with the Black Star operatives and drew his own firearm, casually applying the silencer to the pistol as if nothing were happening around him.

"Aush?" the Gamma said, his voice a mix of disgust and accusation. "What the hell is this, soldier?"

Aush looked up at his superior, twisting the silencer into place with a final effort.

"Nine of us, and seven of them," Keelik thought aloud, his own weapon still trained on Fox's booth across the room. "Seems dangerous with so many prisoners to watch over. Anyone here not of value, Aush?"

Aush nodded, moving towards the center table under the Black Star guns and striding to a stop in front of Gamma Crendon. For his part, the jackal didn't flinch at all, watching with the same angered expression as before.

"Tell them Leon's misunderstood," he said before turning to Fox. His eyes betrayed only the faintest hint of uncertainty, hidden deep beneath a mask of confidence and defiance. Even when faced with the very real possibility of death, he seemed committed to a purpose. The fact that his words were bizarre given the circumstances didn't even register to Fox, even as the vulpine subconsciously etched them into his memory. "On _Threshold. _Tell my men that Leon-."

Without further hesitation, Aush raised his weapon to Crendon's turned head.

For the first time in a long time, the gunshot made Fox turn away and shudder as Lieutenant Thorne yelped in surprise. It didn't seem right that the impotent _chirp_ created by the suppressor could end the life of a battle-tested marine. Even as Crendon's body crumpled to the ground along with the shell casing from Aush's weapon, Fox refused to look, focusing instead on the empty seating across the table from himself.

"Now that I have your attention," Keelik said, his civilian-clothed operatives spreading out around the restaurant. "Would you all kindly drop your weapons and take a seat at this table here?" He gestured at the center table with Hartford and Bishop. "There seems to be an opening."

* * *

Miyu yanked the knife free from the packed sand, glancing over at the closed door to the restaurant, just a stone's throw away.

Looking down at the weapon in her hand, the lynx silently cursed herself for the lightweight clothes she was wearing; the metal instrument was too heavy to securely store anywhere on her person. Her holdout pistol was occupying the only viable spot, strapped against her thigh. A breeze blew in from the ocean, causing waves to run through her coverup and skirt as she thought. The fact that the object she held would never leave its owner's side unless left somewhere on purpose weighed heavier on her than the dense gauge steel it was made of.

Katt stumbled up beside Miyu, the pink feline's stylish sandals impeding her gait in the shifting sand.

"What about the towels?" she asked after taking a moment to catch her breath.

The lynx looked at her. "Really?" Miyu said with a bit of a bite, unable to believe Katt would bring up something so trivial when something had obviously gone wrong with the meeting.

The back door to the _Coral Sun _opened again at that moment, drawing both of the girls' attention. A man walked out, donning a pair of shades against the sun now rising high in the sky, and closed the door behind him. He stood on the small wooden balcony, just a step or two removed from the sand below it, leaning against the wooden wall of the eatery and looking out over the beach. A tropical bird cawed somewhere nearby as the man's sunglasses stopped on the girls, only catching their backs as they walked away down the row of buildings backing up against the sand.

"Do you think he recognized us?" Katt asked quietly.

"Couldn't say," Miyu replied, careful to keep Rhena's knife tucked against her forearm. "Let's check the front."

They passed a few more wooden buildings before slipping between two of them and out of the sand, proceeding inland towards the street that ran along the front of the structures. The passage was narrow and dusty, though clearly not untraveled. Dozens of people seeking to make a quick transit from the shops and stores of the road to the beach, and vice versa, had packed the loose earth into the same hardened dirt bed as the road they were heading towards. They emerged from the small alley and into the light foot traffic of the shopping district, casually strolling down the road back towards the _Coral Sun_.

On the side of the road leading further inland, the building construction material abruptly shifted towards the sun-scorched brick they had seen during their drive the day before. They hugged these sturdier structures, trying to stay as invisible as possible and successfully blending into the groups of beach goers. Miyu kept the arm sheltering Rhena's knife tucked against her side, giving her a slightly odd stride but doing a good job of concealing the weapon from view.

They soon found themselves across the street from the _Coral Sun_, slowly pacing in front of an outdoor clothing store and casually stealing glances back at the eatery.

Out in the street, pulled up in front of the porch of the restaurant, sat a pair of the open top taxi cabs of the kind the team had taken from the starport the day before. The lead car was idling, the hybrid engine quiet but humming at a steady rate, with the driver sitting behind the wheel. Behind it, the second car was turned off, with its driver standing and leaning against the driver side door, evidently unwilling to sit still like his partner. He had his arms crossed and his sunglasses on, casually surveying the street's shops and occupants. Behind him, the restaurant's front porch was empty.

"Looks like someone knew we were down here," the lynx muttered, returning her eyes to the blouse her fingers were idly playing with on the store's display rack. "We were sold out."

"Aush?" Katt asked in a whisper, hovering on the other side of the rack.

"Yeah," Miyu replied, looking over her shoulder again. "Almost-"

Miyu froze. The standing driver's sunglasses were centered directly on her and Katt. Her heart skipped a beat and she barely suppressed an involuntary twitch towards her holdout pistol, redirecting the urge into a vice grip on the blouse. The moment hung in the air, and it seemed like at any second, the driver would raise the alarm, or pull a weapon, or something to indicate that he had found some associates of those being held inside the restaurant.

But instead, the man's lips curled into a tiny smile, and he looked off somewhere else, amused that he had caught a couple cute girls staring at him.

Miyu slowly turned around, catching Katt's eye. She breathed out, noticing that the pink feline seemed almost oblivious to what had just happened.

"Okay, so, they're after the bounties," the lynx exhaled.

"How do you know that?"

"That driver didn't recognize us," Miyu answered. "Aush probably thinks we're at the starport. That just might give us some leeway."

"Leeway for what?"

"To free them," Miyu replied, realizing in the back of her mind just how lost Katt would've been tactically without her. It was a slightly proud moment, but one quickly doused by the danger of their situation. She suddenly found herself wishing she had her suit of combat armor.

"And how do we do that?" Katt asked, her voice taking on a reproachful tone. "I may not know a pistol from a rifle, but babe, it don't take a soldier to know we can't just charge in there. They've probably got like...five guys in there!"

Miyu nodded, rubbing the back of her neck. _'We'll have to lure them outside, make 'em vulnerable to be picked off.' _She cocked her head to the side, still holding the same blouse on the store rack. _'So...how do we do that?'_

"Excuse me, ma'am?" the store owner said, drawing Miyu from her thoughts. The proprietor was a pleasant, middle-aged woman, decked out in enough palm tree patterns and seashell jewelry to make it obvious that she was nowhere near the island native she probably claimed to be. "Did you want to try that on?"

Miyu looked at her for a moment before realized that she was referring to the article of clothing she had been idling by for the last few minutes.

"It's just you've been staring at that blouse for awhile now. It's on sale you know."

"Oh, that's okay," Miyu replied, trying but failing to offer a genuine smile. "I'm just looking."

"Well okay," the store's owner trailed off, having heard the line plenty of times before. "But just know that you can go walking all through the island and you won't find a better price."

Miyu again offered a half-hearted smile of thanks before Katt spoke up, drawing the owner's attention and inquiring about another rack of clothes.

As the pink feline and the lady chatted, Miyu looked back down at the blouse, feeling the fabric with her fingers. A breeze floated by, tussling the fur on her head and carrying with it the sound of crashing waves and excited voices. Something the store owner said was nagging at the lynx, tugging on a cord in her brain as if begging for attention.

She turned her head around. Miyu's eyes lingered on the vehicles as her thoughts lined up like bullets in a magazine. Chambering the first, her conclusions followed in rapid succession.

_'They'll need to move Fox and them at some point,' _she thought. _'Otherwise people will wonder why the restaurant is closed. Which is what those taxis are for. If the taxis don't work, they'll move them on foot through the island to wherever they're gonna hold them for the bounties. So to get them in the open...we disable the taxis.'_

"Katt, I've got it," Miyu said suddenly, her eyes lighting up. "How do you fry a hybrid engine?"

Katt and the store owner stopped talking, looking at Miyu as though she had just sprouted another head. The silence hung in the air for a moment before the owner offered a polite, forced smile.

"I'll um, just leave you two to it then," she said, turning on her heel and walking back into the store.

"Er, why?" the mechanically-inclined feline asked, stepping closer to Miyu so they could talk more quietly. She cocked her head. "You feeling okay, Miyu?"

"Just trust me," Miyu said, wanting to gesture back towards the taxis pulled up in front of the _Coral Sun _but knowing that might tip the drivers off if they happened to be looking at her at that moment.

"Um, sure," Katt thought aloud, cocking her hips and crossing her arms. Her eyes turned skyward, staring up at the wooden awning casting shade down on them. "Well, you could clog the air intake, stop the fuel cells from working that way. You could...take out the controller board, fry the electronics of the thing." She paused, shrugging. "Or you could just start cutting wires. One of them's bound to be something important." She looked at Miyu. "Why do you need to know this again?"

Rhena's knife felt sharp against the fine fur of Miyu's forearm as Katt said the last method, still tucked out of sight. "If we can get these guys to transport everyone on foot, we might be able to free them somehow."

"Oh, sure," Katt agreed, trying and failing to save face. "That makes sense." She looked past Miyu at the pair of cars, seeing the drivers. "But how can we do that without them noticing?"

Miyu smirked, looking Katt up and down. "Remember that bar back on Venture Station?"

* * *

Miyu smirked again as she heard the lead taxi turn its engine off, the driver scrambling out of the cabin.

Without waiting, the lynx made her way from the store towards the vehicles, careful to keep Rhena's knife hidden and careful to look as casual as possible. Whether or not she succeeded she couldn't tell, but stopping to look around wouldn't help matters any. Along the way, she noticed Katt pausing at the top of the steps to the _Coral Sun_'s porch, glancing back over her shoulder at the approaching drivers as though she were unsure of what was going on.

"What?" the pink feline asked sweetly, turning around.

"You ah, you can't go in there," the first driver said, taking off his sunglasses and climbing a few steps before stopping. The second driver, who had been sitting in the lead taxi, scrambled up beside his partner, looking up at the girl standing above them.

"Why not?" Katt questioned. "I just wanted to get some breakfast."

Miyu noticed that Katt's voice had pitched up several notches from their conversation a minute earlier by the clothing rack, and that her posture had taken on a quality that could only be described as intriguing. The lynx briefly wondered if that was really all it took to distract a man from guard duty as she came up on the rear car, her bare feet noiseless on the heavily packed dirt. As she reached the vehicle and crouched behind it though, she caught the second driver, the one who had just gotten out of the front car, taking on more edge in his voice.

"C'mon girl, you're not allowed up there," he growled. "Plenty of other places around here to eat."

"But I like _this _one," Katt pouted.

"Yeah, c'mon man," the first driver said to the other. "She ain't hurting anyone."

Miyu lay down on the road next to the hybrid, flattening herself out as much as she could and crawling beneath the chassis. The conversation continued as she took stock of the situation beneath the car. The side runners providing steps into the cabin had been a pain to get under, but now that she was there, they made for good cover from casual observers in the street. She paused. No hurried footsteps or alarmed voices came from anywhere nearby. If anyone had seen her crawl under the vehicle, they apparently had chosen to keep it to themselves.

The dust of the dirt street was gritty on her mostly bare back as she began searching for hanging wires. The bottom of the engine block was open for the most part, allowing her easy access to its various components; the parts and pieces were grimy and filled with sand, evidence of a system that was rarely, if ever, taken care of. Miyu smiled as she pulled a cluster of wires out of one of the crevices. It wouldn't be hard to imagine that these things could fail on occasion. If she hid the parts she sabotaged, they might not even realize it was foul play that did it.

She only had a few inches of clearance between her nose and the bottom of the engine, so she tugged the wires closer to see if she could determine what exactly she was cutting. For the most part, the various colors of insulation meant nothing to her though; the sole exception were the red and black wires, which she could vaguely remember hearing were usually connected to a battery. Miyu singled those wires out and raised the knife to the remaining connections. She paused with the edge of the blade resting on the insulation, briefly trying to remember anything else from her past that could prevent electrocution or injury. Coming up with nothing though, she exhaled and pulled the knife across the bundle, severing them in a single slice with only a bit of resistance.

"So you here on vacation?"

"Mmhm."

"Here with anyone else?"

"Yep; just me and a couple of the girls. They ran off to some lame sight seeing tour though, so I'm stuck alone for the morning."

Miyu smirked as she worked, slicing through any wire she could find while carefully avoiding the red and black ones. Based on what she could hear underneath the car, Katt certainly had a way of toying with the man's thought process.

"All alone, huh?"

"Janson, c'mon. You know what'll happen if he comes out and sees her up there?"

"If _who _comes out, hon?"

"Relax Jacob, just...relax." There was a slight pause before the same man spoke up again. "So, your friends sound kinda boring."

"Ugh, tell me about it."

Satisfied with her work, Miyu looked around, trying to think of a way to get to the lead car. Straining her head back, she could see through upside-down eyes that the back bumper wasn't more than a meter away from the front bumper of the car she was under. Still, as she wriggled her way closer on her back, she could tell that the distance was just long enough to get into trouble if she didn't make sure she was clear of any watchful eyes. Miyu stopped just short of the front bumper, remaining in the shade of the car chassis above her and glancing over at the porch, just a few meters away.

"Well, I know a place that might be a bit more exciting if you're interested."

From the street, Miyu could see Katt standing atop the porch stairs, looking down on the two drivers at the bottom. One man was a few steps up, trying to stand as nonchalantly as possible and clearly enamored with the feline, while the other stood just a few meters from Miyu, glancing back over his shoulder at the street every so often and trying to convince his friend to stop hitting on Katt. The second man made Miyu nervous with the way he sporadically swept his gaze back over the street between hushed words to his partner.

Katt must have seen Miyu though, because as the lynx was pondering how she could signal the feline to do something, Katt suddenly took a few steps back towards the _Coral Sun_'s front door.

"I dunno, I'm kind of excited for this place-"

"Wait!" the would be suitor exclaimed, taking another step up the stairs. His partner jumped and raced past him, reaching the top and taking Katt's arm before she could reach the door handle.

"Okay, okay, jeez," Katt complied, allowing the driver to guide her back to the top of the stairs. "You boys don't have to be so pushy."

The driver named Janson quickly ascended the stairs and took Katt's arm from his partner, shooting the other driver a dirty look before turning back to the feline.

"I'm sorry, my friend just uh, doesn't appreciate a fine lady when he sees one."

From underneath the lead car, Miyu relaxed and began repeating the same process as before, knowing she hadn't been seen. It wasn't long before the bottom of the engine block resembled a jungle of cut wires, hanging down like vines. She stuffed them into any corners she could find to hide them from view, before shimmying to the front of the lead car, and waiting for a verbal cue that she knew she wasn't being watched.

"Well I work at a club further inland; you should check it out sometime-"

"Janson, she really shouldn't be here."

"Jacob, c'mon."

"Oh no, tell me more. Which club?"

Miyu reached out and grabbed the front bumper, hauling herself out from beneath the taxi and into the open in one fluid movement. She rose to a crouch, expecting someone to point her out at any moment. When nothing happened, however, she peered over the hood of the taxi at the scene in front of the _Coral Sun_, making sure the observant driver wasn't looking her way before standing upright and strolling off into the street. She was careful to keep Rhena's knife tucked flat against the back of her forearm, and made sure to make eye contact with Katt once before disappearing down an alley, and out of sight.

* * *

"Very good. I look forward to dealing with you, too."

Keelik lowered the com unit from his ear, focusing on the device for a moment before thumbing it off. He looked up at the hostages he had gathered near the center table with a smile, gesturing with the com unit.

"Looks like you're all worth keeping alive after all," the wolf said, tossing the com unit to a guard. He looked specifically at Hartford and Bishop where they sat on the wood floor next to Lieutenant Thorne. "And my life just got a lot easier. Seems Warlord Bauker's people have some interest in Cornerian officers. They've got a contact en route from another island as we speak. Shouldn't take more than twenty minutes."

Bishop and Lieutenant Thorne glanced at each other, their somber expressions saying more about their fear of being turned in as traitors to Bauker's alliance than any words could.

Falco raised his hand, shaking it a little like a student in school trying to get the teacher's attention.

"What about the rest of us?" he asked when Keelik's eyes turned his way.

"The disappearance of serving Cornerian officers is gonna cause a bit of a ruckus around here," Keelik explained, pacing around the railing that separated the depressed middle of the room from the rest of the eatery. The Black Star operatives were spread out around the railing, their silenced weapons drawn but held casually, as if daring one of their captives to try to escape. "Lots of investigations, lots of people poking around. So we'll hold you somewhere until the heat blows over and the Cornerians won't connect our turning you in for your bounties with _their _status as M.I.A." He gestured at the trio of Cornerian officers.

"Speaking of which, we should probably get you moving," Keelik continued, smirking. "Having you all sitting together makes me nervous. This looks like the kind of crowd who appreciates a good jail break. At least if Aush's report is true."

Aush stood with his arms crossed by the front door, his pistol holstered, watching the scene with the same, stoic, disinterested expression he always seemed to wear. The husky stared at the Star Fox team and the Cornerian officers without any sort of indication that he heard his name being said. If he felt any remorse for his actions, he didn't show it.

Keelik nodded at a henchman standing next to Aush, who proceeded to open the door and step outside, calling to someone out front. Through the open door, those held captive could see the tops of a pair of vehicles parked in the road.

"Cuff Mr. McCloud and put him in the front car," Keelik went on, pointing to more of the operatives and giving them assignments. He looked at Falco and Rhena, noticing how their body postures seemed to shy away from each other, despite the fact that they were supposedly part of the same mercenary team. He braced his hands on the railing as he finished his command. "And put Lombari and Haggerty in the other car. Cuff them together."

Falco and Rhena looked at each other, both equally surprised and irritated that such an odd command was given.

The Black Star operatives went about carrying out their orders, some of them staying at the railing with their weapons ready, while others fastened the metal handcuffs to the necessary captives. Outside, above the noise of floorboards creaking and cuff chains rattling, those within the restaurant could barely hear some conversational shouting between the man who had just walked outside and presumably the drivers of the vehicles out front. Standing next to the front door, Aush caught the words better than anyone else, and was already looking at Keelik when the henchman came back inside.

"Mr. Keelik, we've got a problem," the man said, his face ready to cringe at the news he had to deliver. "The cars are dead."

Keelik looked at him and narrowed his eyes. "Dead?"

"They're ah...they're not working; drivers don't know what happened."

Fox's ears pricked as an operative hauled the vulpine to his feet, his wrists cuffed in front of him. It wasn't so much the subsequent chewing out between Keelik and the unfortunate man who delivered the news that he was listening to. Instead, Fox's mind was occupied with the initial news itself. The idea that both vehicles would fail by themselves for no apparent reason was highly unlikely, even in a machine-unfriendly, sandy environment like Barrados. Keelik seemed to come to the same conclusion.

"The drivers were waiting in the cars the whole time?" the wolf asked.

"That's what they said," the henchman replied.

"Bullshit," Keelik retorted. He fell quiet, looking down at the railing as his mind scrambled to fill in the hole in his plan this new development left. It didn't occur to him for a second that the cars' failing was anything less than sabotage. As he thought, Falco and Rhena were cuffed together at the wrist and pushed to their feet to join Fox, the three of them gathering under guard by the front door of the restaurant.

"Are you sure nobody else was here working with you?" the wolf asked, looking at Aush. His eyes were narrowed, making it clear that the husky was beginning to suffer some of the blame in Keelik's mind. "I wouldn't put it past your Lord O'Donnell to send agents to tail his own men. Especially if he smelled a rodent trying to cash in on his prize merc squad."

Aush took the implied insult without flinching. He stared back at Keelik, hands crossed at the small of his back, one of them toting his pistol.

"There are four marines up on _Threshold _guarding our ships," he answered, his voice calm with an understated resonance that caught the mercenaries off guard. It was the first time they had heard him speak. "They're blind to all this. There are also two girls waiting for us at the starport, but they aren't an issue. One, the lynx, is a competent fighter, but lacks initiative. The other is a beach ditz not worth mentioning."

"And you're certain they're at the starport," Keelik stated as a question.

Aush cast Fox a sideways glance, the vulpine meeting his gaze evenly and without emotion. Fox, for his part, did his best to keep a neutral, slightly angry expression on his features, praying that he was pulling it off convincingly as part of him wondered where Miyu and Katt were at the moment.

"They aren't the sort who could sabotage your vehicles," Aush replied, looking back at Keelik. "The lynx was an independent mercenary not so long ago; if McCloud doesn't turn up with her paycheck, she'll have no reason to stick around. She'll disappear."

"And the other?"

"Not worth mentioning."

Keelik fell quiet again. It wasn't hard to see that he didn't like the idea of moving the captive mercenaries on foot, even if the club wasn't that far away. However, without the taxis they had secured for the operation, there wasn't much of an alternative. Obtaining other vehicles would be easier said than done; the island's taxi service offered the only motorized method of transportation in Barrados. They would have to hijack other taxis, which would bring security down on the Black Star operatives far sooner than they would be ready for.

The wolf kept his thought process to himself, masking his poor planning in the transportation department under an expression of intense consideration. Showing weakness wouldn't do anybody present any good, particularly the captives. As he was contemplating how he could quickly gain access to other vehicles, his train of though was interrupted by one of his men.

"Ah, Mr. Keelik?" a Black Star guard spoke up, hand to his ear. It was the same operative the wolf had tossed the comlink to before. "Just got a call from our guy at starport security. Apparently some shopkeeper just called in a report about two people doing some suspicious stuff around a couple vehicles. They're sending out a patrol to investigate."

Keelik's head snapped to look at the speaking guard. "Tell our man to stall them however he can." Suddenly left with no alternative, his mind fell into gear, and he began barking orders at his men. "We're moving the bounties on foot to the club. The officers can stay here; Bauker's men should get here before the starport patrol shows up."

"You and you," he said, gesturing at a pair of his subordinates standing nearby. "We'll take McCloud out the back, then through the alleys. The club's only a few streets inland from here."

"You two," he continued, pointing at two guards standing close to the front door. "Get the drivers and take Lombardi and Haggerty a minute after us. _Stick _to the alleys." He emphasized the word, his gaze underlining the intensity that had flared up in him. "Someone is out there messin' with us and I don't like it. Stay alert."

"What about me?" Aush asked as the Star Fox mercenaries were shoved towards the back door of the _Coral Sun, _their sandals and boots dragging on the floorboards amidst the tinkling of handcuff chains.

"You'll get your reward," Keelik said assuredly, checking the silencer on his pistol before slipping it back into his waist band. "Stay here with the rest of my men and wait for Bauker's contact to show up. Then meet us back at the club."

"Everyone got it? Everyone good? Then let's move."

* * *

**A/N: **Not much to say down here except that we've got one more chapter until the end of the unofficial "Part Two" of the story. I'll do a better summary of my plans for the third and final portion at the end of my next entry. Also, I've started putting chapter status updates in my profile, so if you're looking for progress or an ETA until the next entry, that's where to look. Review time!

**Andross Kenobi:** Well, I'm happy to make you wish for sandier shores :) But I'm glad you brought up the bit about difficult to follow narrative. I've been trying to keep an eye on how I write "travel" scenes (characters moving from one place to another while conveying expository dialogue), since its so easy for those to become confusing. Looks like I'll have to try harder! Thanks for the critique AndrossKenobi! And that's an interesting idea about Fara...very interesting indeed...

**RedBay: **Thanks for the kind words, RedBay. I can perfectly understand your confusion with some of the minor characters; in all honesty, I wasn't sure myself who I wanted to bring back and who I would just toss aside when I wrote those past chapters. It was quite a while ago. While that method's given me a lot of possible strings to snatch up, it also leaves plenty loose and hanging. Just part of learning how to write I suppose, and something to keep in mind for future projects. And did I just read that you're working on your own books? S'mighty impressive, Red. Best of luck to you with that!

**The Frustrated**: Hey, no apologies necessary. Any review is a useful review! Hopefully the transition transisted well enough in your town; I know its taking ages around my place.

**Jack Falconer:** Thanks for the reviews, Jack! I think (though I could be wrong) that I toned down some of the descriptions as the story has progressed, so hopefully that won't be so much of a drag. And either my writing is predictable, or you've got a nose for narrative; nice job calling out those hunches :P

-Redd


	39. Chapter 39: Hurricane

Just a quick forewarning, this chapter earns the story's T rating. It's not too graphic, but some descriptive violence does occur here.

* * *

**XXXIX:** Hurricane

It was nearly noon, and the full force of the sun was just beginning to bear down on those vacationers stretched out all along the shores of Barrados. Seeking an escape from the heat, many of them chose to take shelter in the shade of the numerous store awnings and restaurant balconies, filling the streets with a chorus of generally upbeat conversation and banter. The tunes of a live street band somewhere further inland filtered through the din, like the cool morning breeze that had since given way to a dusty midday oven.

The bright, searing sunlight bleached the island a dry white, reflected in the mirror-like sunglasses worn by most of the patrons of the various shops and eateries. The exotic, metallic earrings of some of the women walking around bounced the light when viewed just right, as did every other shiny surface on the streets.

Amidst the strong presence of the persistent crowd, a clump of beings strode from the shade of a beach-adjacent alley. The group of four made their way amongst the tourists, blending right in even as they crossed the road at an angle perpendicular to the foot traffic, and proceeded into another alley leading between two brick buildings. Were anyone to glance closely at the fox in the middle of the four man formation, they might have noticed that his wrists were connected by a series of metal chain links. However, they proceeded undisturbed, and soon made their way out of sight.

A minute passed. A family of hares walked by, the parents of a child gazing happily down at their young offspring as the little boy led them with beach toys in hand. A subdued group of young adults stumbled wearily down the road, evidently having just recently awoken from a rowdy night. A lynx and a feline loitered near an alleyway, discussing something in hushed tones. The pink cat removed her coverup, leaving only the bikini top beneath, and handed it to her partner, who slunk off somewhere out of sight.

A moment later, another group emerged from the beach-adjacent alley, this time a party six strong. A couple of average looking men led them, followed by what appeared to be a young couple holding hands. Another pair of casually dressed men lagged behind by a few steps, looking unsure of themselves. They proceeded along the same path as the group that had proceeded them, crossing the road and making for the alley opposite the one they had just exited.

As they neared, the pink feline seemed to materialize out of one of the shops nearby, crossing the target alley with a strut and catching the eye of one of the lagging men. She tossed him a wink and posted up against one corner of the alley, her back against the brick. With one finger and a devious smile, the feline beckoned him to stop and join her.

"Janson..." Jacob muttered warningly as he watched his partner's expression brighten.

"Oh c'mon man," Janson replied. "I'm just gonna talk for a bit. I'll catch up with you guys in a second."

"And if they ask where you are?"

"Just...cover for me, man."

"Keelik's gonna kill you, you do realize that," Jacob said. "And then he's gonna kill me." He looked at Janson' face, hoping to see some sort of realization spread across it. But all he saw was an expression a child could have given a restrictive mother in a candy shop. He sighed, lowering his voice even further as they neared the alley and the fetching feline. "Alright, fine; but you take longer than a minute, and it's your funeral."

Janson grinned in response, slapping his buddy on the back and slowing his stride. The group, now reduced to five, continued on between the buildings, the two men in front oblivious that one of them had stopped to chat up the girl standing at the alley entrance.

The feline smiled invitingly, accepting his verbal advances with an enticing giggle. They stood talking there for a minute, her back leaning against the scorched white brick, while he braced a hand on the wall behind her. To anyone passing by, it was an intimate conversation between two beach goers; hardly an unusual occurrence.

It became substantially more unusual, however, when a lynx approached the man from behind.

Without warning, Miyu shoved Katt's balled up coverup into the man's mouth with one hand, a small metallic instrument flashing in the other. Before Janson's brain could even register surprise, she had her holdout pistol pressed against his spine, finger tightening on the trigger.

The pair of small caliber bullets in the pistol's chambers would be easily loud enough to cause a panic in the immediate area, hopefully setting the men who had abducted Fox and his team on edge, where they might start making mistakes. Miyu reasoned that Fox and the others weren't in any actual danger, even if she stirred the proverbial pot; with the bounties for live capture worth far more than the alternative, the bounty hunters would do everything they could to keep them alive. Miyu planned to exploit that fact.

However, even with her plan in place, she found herself hesitating as the metal of her gun pushed into the unfortunate man's shirt. An image of Linka's comatose form suddenly flashed through her mind for reasons she couldn't entirely explain, and suddenly the gun was pointed at the man's leg instead.

Just as his brain registered that someone was apparently trying to choke him, and he managed to grab the pistol hidden in his waistband, a loud _pop _assaulted his ear drums, followed by a second in rapid succession. An unbelievably sharp pain shot through his nervous system, like someone had jabbed a stake into each of his thighs, and his legs gave out from under him.

The lynx lifted her nose skyward. "He's got a gun!" she shouted at the top of her lungs, dropping her spent pistol to the ground and pointing at some unlucky stranger across the road. As Janson fell against her, the hand she instinctively tried to brace him with instead found the pistol he was trying to pull. She slipped it from his grasp as he hit the ground, holding it hidden behind her.

It only took a moment for someone in the crowd of people in the street to screech in alarm before the entire scene erupted into panic. All anyone ever saw was a man crumpled on the ground, moaning and bleeding from wounds to his legs. If a witness had shouted she had seen a gunman, that was enough. Taking time to investigate was the furthest from anyone's mind. Fear stricken tourists fled in all directions, nobody sure exactly where the shots had come from, but all fairly certain that running at full tilt would be the best option for them.

"You shot him!" Katt said above the panicked cries and shouts, barely able to hear herself. "You actually shot him!"

"That was plan!" Miyu shot back, fairly certain they wouldn't be overheard in the confusion. "I told you!"

"Yeah, but I didn't think you'd actually do it!" Katt replied as they ran down the alley Fox, Falco, Rhena, and their captors had taken a few minutes earlier. She looked shaken, and kept tossing glances back at Janson as he writhed in pain on the ground. "What now?"

"Get back to the starport," Miyu said, shifting her newly acquired firearm to her left hand as she stopped and stooped to grab something from the alley floor with her right.

Rhena's knife.

Blade in one hand, gun in the other, she looked over at her companion, knowing that getting out of what was sure to become a combat zone was of the utmost importance to pink, pacifistic feline. "I'll meet you there."

* * *

Moments before, Falco felt Rhena squeeze his hand as they walked into the alley from the street.

He glanced at her, cocking an eyebrow and mindful of the Black Star guards escorting them. Sure, each of them had the hand closest to the other cuffed together, but even so, he found it distinctly odd and a little disturbing that the wolf would try to reassure him.

Rhena didn't look at him though; she didn't even acknowledge that she had done anything. They continued walking, the guards around them breathing a little easier now that they were well into the alley and out of the street. The handcuffs were heavy on their wrists. Just as Falco was about to turn away and chalk it up to the secret crush he was pretty sure every female had on him, her eyes flicked to the side.

The avian followed her line of sight, noticing a small pile of refuse gathered against the alley wall. Out of the top of the small pile of paper and garbage, Falco noticed what looked like a hilt of some sort, colored solid black. Rhena squeezed his hand again.

_'Is it her knife?' _he thought, resisting the urge to ask the question aloud. _'Why would her knife be...Miyu. It's Miyu.' _He couldn't stop a tiny smirk from tugging at the corner of his mouth. _'That crazy broad.'_

Falco began keeping tabs on the guard next to him as the group turned down a cross alley, tracking the man's position out of the corner of his eye. As he did, he noticed that besides his stride, he only heard the scratchy footfalls of four others: Rhena's, and those of three Black Star guards. Where was the fourth? Had the lynx struck already? Did that peashooter of Katt's have a silencer on it?

_Pop pop._

_"Guess not."_

The guard next to him froze as the sound echoed down the brick walls, gripping his silenced pistol.

Falco grabbed the guard's wrist with his free hand, yanking the man towards him. The sudden force caused the guard to trip over his own feet. As he tumbled to the ground, his head found itself interrupted by Falco's knee, snapping it back with an audible crack. The man hit the alley floor a moment later, dazed.

Before Falco could deliver a disabling blow, the handcuff chain tightened. He was torn sideways as Rhena's restrained hand shot out, apparently ignorant of the fact that another being's wrist was fastened to it.

On Rhena's side, her cuffed hand found the wrist of a guard who had drawn his pistol. With a vicious twist she torqued the delicate bones, doubling the man over and locking his fingers in place. The wolf's free hand wrapped around the pistol grip, squeezing the trigger several times.

_Thwap thwap thwap._

The third guard crumpled the ground behind them in a mist of red.

Twisting the gun further, Rhena triggered another shot. A small hole appeared in the gun owner's head, and his grip on the pistol finally released.

Now with sole ownership of the pistol, Rhena stood upright, ignoring Falco's yelp of surprise. With cold precision and a single shot, she finished off the guard Falco had stunned. The shell casing tumbled out of the pistol's chamber, silent as it hit the packed dirt of the alley floor.

The mercenaries stood as they were for a moment, Rhena tall and with her gun hand stretched out, Falco bent over as his arm twisted at an unnatural angle thanks to the handcuffs. The sounds of panic in the streets of Barrados drifted into the alley.

"Holy shit," Falco breathed out, straightening up. "Damn near tore my arm off, you know."

Rhena glared at him.

"Sure. Alright," he continued, lifting his cuffed wrist, and by extension hers. He pointed at her gun. "Take care of this and we'll go spring Fox."

Rhena ignored him, looking around the alley, apparently trying to get her barrings.

Falco flicked his eyes. "Er, okay then." He bent down to grab another guard's disused pistol from the ground. Before he could grip it though, the cuffs pulled taut again, and he was yanked towards a side alley by Rhena's powerful tug.

"Wait a sec, would ya?" he hollered, pulling Rhena to a stop. He recognized the building visible at the end of the side alley she chose. "You're going the wrong way anyway, that's back towards the restaurant. Fox is-"

The sight of a silencer pointed between his eyes stopped him dead in his tracks. Rhena's eyes glowed behind it, not with menace, but with a look that clearly stated she had different priorities than the avian. Falco's eyes centered on the end of the barrel.

"You know, I think I preferred it when you could just tell me off."

* * *

They all heard the knock.

Gathered in the middle of the _Coral Sun, _all three Cornerian officers had also heard the distant pair of gunshots a few minutes prior. The sounds and subsequent panic in the street outside had set their captors on edge, the trio of Black Star operatives having become noticeably more twitchy and quick to raise their weapons whenever one of the Cornerians made any movement. Aush, on the other hand, hadn't changed his manor at all; while the Black Star guards tried to chat away their nerves, the husky remained quiet, watching the prisoners with an eerie intensity.

Bishop, Hartford, and Lieutenant Thorne were seated, handcuffed in the open on the wooden floor, the nearby tables and chairs having been moved away since Keelik and the Star Fox team had left. Gamma Crendon's body still lay nearby, unmoved save for his pistol, which had been removed and placed in the pile with the rest of their weapons on the other side of the restaurant. Given their position the idea of making an escape attempt was suicidal, but the Cornerians were growing restless as the minutes ticked by, knowing that Bauker's men were on their way.

The knock at the front door of the _Coral Sun_ made them forget all about that though.

Their captors fell silent, looking at each other and unsure of what to do. If Keelik or one of the other Black Star men was returning to the restaurant, wouldn't they have called on the com? They looked down at the Cornerian officers below them. Had one of the mercenaries escaped somehow?

Without shifting his expression at all, Aush took over for the directionless guards, pulling the slide on his pistol to make sure it was cocked.

"One of you grab a hostage," he ordered, moving towards the front door. "Everyone strap up."

The Black Star men looked at him for a moment, hesitating. Their minds churned, deciding whether or not they should take orders from this informant who wasn't even part of the organization. However, when none of them offered any alternative, they complied. They checked their weapons, two of them moving for cover while a third approached the Cornerians. Keelik paused at the door.

The Black Star guard grabbed Bishop by the collar, hauling the hare to his feet. Bishop's handcuff chain rattled as he stumbled with the man towards the front door with Aush, mindful of the pistol silencer stuck against his neck.

"Alright," the hostage taker said, glancing at his comrades and then at Aush. "We're rea-"

With a loud _crack _the back door was kicked in, surprising everyone within the restaurant.

A blur of blue and military drab rushed in, a metallic instrument raised with both hands. Aush, the only one facing the back of the restaurant at the moment, saw the silhouette of a pistol, and in the ensuing moments, little else.

Time slowed for Falco, even as his brain buzzed with activity. Target left. Target right. Hartford and Thorne on the floor, with Aush beyond them.

He tracked right and crouched, lining up the tab of his pistol's barrel. The slide of his weapon snapped back twice in rapid succession, ejecting a smoking shell casing with each cycle. They tumbled through the air, flashing in the sunlight pouring through the door behind him before plummeting to the floor.

Without waiting to see if his shots connected, he whipped his weapon to the left mid-stride, centering another target. Two shots tore through the Black Star operative's back, just as he was turning around.

Falco was several steps into the _Coral Sun_. Casings pinged off the wooden floorboards below, even as they creaked under his weight. His pistol found a third target. He blinked.

The last standing Black Star operative managed to turn around, his arm tight around Bishop's upper chest and neck. His pistol was pressed against the hare's temple. Behind them, Aush stood at the front door, raising his weapon at the avian.

Falco stopped, his mind grinding. The three of them stood in a line. Bishop. The Black Star operative. Aush. Shooting at any one of them would heavily risk tagging Bishop. With his revolver Falco might have taken the shot, but with the unfamiliar weapon in his hands...

Just as Aush took a bead on Falco, the front door leaped out and nearly bowled him over from behind. His gun hand tilted up, and his shot poked a new, tiny skylight in the restaurant ceiling.

Before Aush could question what had spoiled his aim, an instantly familiar scream of fury erupted behind him, and suddenly the wood of the floor rushed up to meet him. His pistol skittered away. Without thinking he rolled, narrowly avoiding the knee of a fire-haired wolf as it splintered the wood board it struck.

Aush scrambled to his knees, throwing his arms up to block a kick. The force of the wolf's boot shoved him backwards and he gained his feet, just as his assailant did hers.

Rhena glared at him, her eyes narrowed in cold rage. Aush had seen that look before, surrounded by padded mats and sparring equipment, back on the _Lone Wolf_. Back where she could be called off with a word of surrender. He had no time to recollect further. Like a spring coiled, she launched herself at him.

The remaining Black Star operative twisted his head to see what was happening behind him. He immediately regretted his action though, as Bishop twisted the opposite way, trying to break free. His straining gave Falco a better shot, something the avian took advantage of.

Falco's slug soared straight and true, tearing through the guard's shoulder.

The second gunshot, however, wasn't his.

"No!"

Lieutenant Thorne cried out as Bishop fell limp in the guard's grip, a small, cherry red hole in his temple. A flurry of red mist sprouted from the guard as Falco cursed aloud and unloaded on him, no further reason to take caution.

Above them, Rhena ducked a wild swing and tackled the traitorous husky, driving her shoulder into his stomach. They fell atop each other, a mess of flailing limbs and surgical strikes.

Falco tracked them, knowing that Aush was the only threat left in the room. When Rhena straddled the husky, the avian found a clear shot and pulled the trigger, only to receive a _click _in return. He cursed again, tossing the empty firearm aside and dashing towards one of the fallen Black Star guards.

Rhena's fist caved Aush's muzzle, spurting blood onto her pilot's suit and eliciting a yelp from the husky. He managed to block her next blow, getting his legs underneath her and pushing her off.

The wolf caught her feet. As she rose, a flash caught her eye. Aush's gun lay by her boot.

Aush tried to rise up, dazed but knowing life lay on his feet, not on the ground. A freight train slammed into him again though, and his back once more became intimate with the wooden floor.

The question lingering in the back of his mind as to where his gun had gotten off to was suddenly answered is its metal grip was repeatedly slammed into his mouth. Again and again it came down, sending jolts of pain through his nervous system with every strike.

Rhena's hand became matted with his blood as she beat him, the hilt of the pistol making a little more progress with every blow. With a final cry of exertion, she struck him once more before lifting the gun to his forehead.

With a quiet _thwap_, Aush was no more.

Rhena sat there, huffing with the sudden strain she had put on her body as the restaurant settled. Her muzzle hung open, and her eyes briefly glossed over as her breath caught up with her. After a moment, she slowly rose to her feet, wiping her hands on her flight suit. Looking around, she took in the scene of the _Coral Sun._

Lieutenant Thorne knelt next Bishop's body, gazing at him as though he would reawaken if she stared long enough. There were no tears in her eyes; only an expression of loss and respect. The Black Star guard who had shot him lay beside the hare.

Hartford had crawled over to the pile of pistols the Black Star operatives had taken from the Cornerians, one of them now in his hand. Now that they weren't necessary, the Cornerian captain awkwardly turned the weapon towards his handcuff chain, breaking the metal with a silenced slug.

Falco stood over a fallen guard, raising a scrounged pistol and watching Rhena with a concerned expression. He slowly lowered the weapon, eyes flicking towards the blood on the wolf's hands and clothes. His eyebrows furrowed in something almost approaching disgust as his eyes met hers again, condemning her emotional take down of the husky. He wasn't the least bit sorry Aush was dead, but the brutality of his death surprised him.

Rhena looked down at Aush's body. His head was tilted back at an unnatural angle, a look of surprise and alarm permanently etched into his features. The reserved solider had finally broken down at the very end, the pain and fear evident in his face. Rhena toed his foot with her boot, watching as it limply tilted. Falco wouldn't understand. None of them would. Beneath the layers of stoicism and disinterest in life's lighter moments, there was one value that held sway in her heart, and it alone was ultimately responsible for what she had done.

Loyalty.

There was no greater emotional bonding in existence to the fire-haired wolf; no greater sign of respect. It was something given only when truly deserved, and once given, something that was honored until the very end. It was the guiding principle for how she lived her life. Joining the Cornerian military had given that principle focus, and her loyalty shifted to that for a flag and an ideal. Superiors could be incompetent, and subordinates unruly, but an ideal was pure, and deserving of nothing less than one's devotion.

It was this patriotism that caused her to serve proudly under Bill, someone who backed up competency with an unwavering sense of duty. Fox's loyalties to his crew, and his abilities in and out of the cockpit, garnered him a similar level of respect from the wolf, despite the mercenary life he led. But even after exile from her home nation, Corneria still held the highest spot in her mind.

To that end, Aush was everything she despised. Disloyal to those who depended on him, disloyal to his leaders, and most of all, loyal to those who sought to destroy what she loved. He deserved neither mercy nor pity for what he did. All he deserved was punishment.

"We've got to move," Hartford said, approaching the kneeling Lieutenant Thorne and gently tapping her on the shoulder. She lifted her hands up, still staring with stoic eyes at the fallen hare before her. Hartford grabbed her cuff chain with one hand, breaking it apart with a silenced round from the pistol in his other. "Bauker's agents will be here any minute."

"I'm going after Fox," Falco replied, dropping his gaze from Rhena and sliding the clip from his pistol out. Satisfied with the full magazine, he rammed it back in, looking over at Lieutenant Thorne. When he saw her beside Bishop's body, he paused, letting his words line up before speaking them. "What was Bishop's plan after this meeting?"

The female hare breathed a quiet, sullen breath before reaching into Bishop's shirt and grasping something hidden beneath it. With a firm tug, she freed the ID tags from their thin necklace, studying them back in the light of the restaurant for a moment before placing them into her pocket. Slowly she stood, unable to take her eyes of her former commander for another few moments. Finally, she turned to Falco.

"The plan was to leave as soon as possible," Thorne answered, her eyes now reflecting only the task ahead of her. She looked at Hartford. "Once we made an arrangement, Bishop and I would take you back to the starport. We have a military shuttle waiting to take us to the _Hauberk. _From there we fly to whatever rendezvous point I assume you have set up with O'Donnell._"_

"What about our ships?" Falco asked.

"We can stop at _Threshold _and drop you off," Thorne replied.

"Great. I'll meet you there then," Falco said before jogging for the door, pistol in hand.

"We can't wait forever," Thorne called after him, accepting a pistol from Hartford.

"Ten minutes," the avian shouted back. "Give us ten minutes."

* * *

It had been some time since the island erupted in activity, prompted by two disturbingly close gunshots.

Frightened tourists were still dashing across the streets and through the various shops and establishments, seeking to gain shelter from the unknown danger. On an island utterly unused to firearms and largely populated by spooked civilians, every sharp noise became another gunshot, and subsequently, the panic only spread rather than ebbing away. A taxi door slamming shut sparked a stampede of people, only to be scattered by the _snap _of a fallen tree branch being trampled under foot. A single isolated incident spread into what appeared to be a criminal uprising, with reports of gunfire clogging the starport security center's com boards.

In the midst of it all, a party of four discretely made their way closer and closer to the club district of the island. They stuck to the alleys when possible, careful to hide their weapons whenever crossing a street or encountering a pack of fleeing civilians.

Fox kept his head down and his feet moving, obeying the gruff commands of Keelik. Even so, he kept the positions of the Black Star operatives around him in mind, sneaking glances when the wolf behind him was busy coordinating with his subordinates. His handcuffs jingled lightly as they walked, making their way down a residential alley.

The wooden buildings on either side of them were practically studded with apartment doors and windows, the wooden balconies overhead nearly spanning the gap between structures. They also formed a ceiling that blocked the direct sunlight, leaving the group a mostly shaded path down the seemingly abandoned side street. The residents were either all hiding or had fled, as they failed to encounter anyone.

"I think Aush may have been wrong about your girl friends," Keelik quipped with a bitter laugh. "Seems they've stirred up the whole damn island-"

_Thwap thwap thwap_

The slugs slapped the scorched brick, tearing off tiny chunks of mortar. For a split second nobody reacted, such was the subtlety of the weapon trained on them. But then the first tendrils of wonder jumped immediately to a mental red alert and all three Black Star operatives whipped around, pulling their weapons.

_Thwap thwap_

Two more slugs tore into the area, but Fox didn't turn around with his captors to see where they were apparently coming from. Even as the rear guard cried out in pain, Fox sprinted forward, throwing his shoulder into the forward guard's gut. The man fell and Fox charged past, eyes locked on a what looked like a branching alley just a few meters away.

Behind him, the forward guard flipped onto his stomach and took aim at the fleeing vulpine, ignoring the new attacker for the moment.

"No!" Keelik shouted from behind a brick apartment staircase. "Take him alive! He won't get far!"

The guard held his fire and pushed himself up, cursing. He stayed low, now fully aware of the slugs zipping past him, and disappeared down the smaller alley his bounty had just taken.

Keelik growled and peaked out of cover, back towards the way they had came.

His rear guard lay almost motionless on the dusty ground, bullet wounds to his back and leg. His breathing was heavy, but he managed to keep enough wits about him to play dead. Further down the alley, Keelik thought he spied the assailant hiding behind a shadowed porch stoop, much like his. The silhouette suddenly popped up and a slug ricocheted off the concrete stairs in front of him, kicking bits of the material into his face.

The wolf cursed and ducked down as more bullets whipped above him.

The chamber of Miyu's pistol snapped back and forth as she fired.

She had seen Fox run off down the alley, but had been unable to stop the man who went after him. With one on the ground and another pinned behind a stoop though, she figured she did all she could.

"_Fox'll just have to figure out the last guy himself," _she reasoned, squeezing off another shot before ducking return fire. A round pinged off the metal railing of the staircase she was hiding behind, almost causing her to yelp in surprise. Fighting with silenced weapons was tricky, and the sudden sound surprised her.

She waited another moment before poking her head out again. The remaining guard had chosen a poor spot for cover, leaving him exposed in the sunlight whenever he looked up. As he popped up again, Miyu blinked. Almost invisible to the lynx in the glare of the sun's rays, a solid strip of blond fur ran across the wolf's face, linking his eyes like a mask. She felt like she recognized the man from somewhere, but in the midst of the firefight, her brain refused to take precious time to plumb her memories for a name to the familiar face.

Bracing her pistol in both hands, she squared up another shot and pulled the trigger, even as a slug blew past her ears.

_Click_.

The lack of a kickback surprised Miyu. She triggered another shot, only to be given the same response.

"_Shit!" _Her mind screamed, realizing what the sound meant.

Ducking down behind her cover, Miyu glanced at her pistol before tossing it to the ground. Reaching under her skirt, she pulled Rhena's knife from the hidden band where Katt's holdout pistol used to sit. What she wouldn't have given for the security of those two shots.

Finally heeding the voice bleating in the back of her head since the bullets began flying, Miyu waited for her adversary to stop firing, and ran. Crouching low, she rushed down the grit of the alley on bare feet, her loose sandals having long ago been discarded. Empty stoops and closed doorways rushed past her while the wooden panels of the alley walls seemed to crawl by. She expected a sharp, all-consuming pain at any second, once the wolf took aim. No matter how well she ducked and hugged the outcroppings, an alley was still an alley. There were only two methods to escape: back the painfully straight and visible way she came, or through one of the closed and presumably locked doors.

Then the pain came. As though from a hot knife, a searing slice appeared on her upper leg, and she nearly pitched to the alley floor. Her mind scrambling and her teeth clenched, Miyu immediately turned and charged shoulder first into the closest wooden door.

The lightweight island wood buckled and the door burst inward, revealing a darkened room.

Miyu immediately sized up the single room residence as belonging to one of Barrados' many low-paid serving workers. One corner was occupied by a small cot and dresser, right next to a rudimentary stove and wash basin. A simple table and chairs took up the remaining wall space, finished off by a plain rug underneath them. The only light was the blinding white of the sun, seeping through the cracks in the paneled walls and window shutters, and the open door behind her. The owner was absent, most likely out at his or her job when the shooting started.

Most importantly, however, there was no exit.

Miyu frantically swept her gaze around, realizing the last fact with an icy stomach. Looking behind her at the alley, she quickly sidestepped and huddled against the shadow of the door frame. The lynx gripped her knife tightly, listening intently as the approaching footsteps became the only noise she cared about. A trickle of blood flowed from her wounded thigh, but she did her best to ignore it, aided by the fact that the area surrounding the injury had become strangely numb. She could still stand on it, which was all that mattered at the moment.

With the brief moment of downtime she allowed her mind though, the answer to who was pursuing her shot to the forefront. Her eyes widened and the knife nearly fell from her grip as his face flashed through her head, followed by a stream of triggered memories. It couldn't be.

Keelik.

* * *

"You are _expendable_; you are _all _expendable."

Richard Keelik stood before a half-dozen pilots, all standing in a run down, rarely cleaned meeting room. Their jumpsuits were a myriad of mismatched colors and fabrics, not one of them showing any of the consistency of a standard uniform. The pilots themselves ran the gambit from young to old and grizzled, though almost all of them were male.

Keelik gazed over them with a disappointed eye, snorting once with derision. While his clothes did nothing to separate him from those gathered before him, his demeanor was one of supreme confidence. It was as though he were doing all of the pilots a favor, merely by gracing them with his presence.

"Don't ever forget that," he continued, a smirk crossing his muzzle. "If you get shot down, nobody will come to collect the pieces. We'll send out a salvage crew for whats left of your ship before we ever come for you."

The gathered pilots took the words without flinching.

"Those words may sound harsh, but take them to heart. A freelancer who gets tagged deserves neither reward nor mercy. If you fail to uphold your contract, there's no reason for us to follow through." Keelik paused, eying each of the six pilots in turn and ending on a young lynx, the only female of the group. He shrugged. "Don't like it? Come back alive, and come back with your objectives met. Then we won't have a problem."

He strode towards the lynx, cocking his head a little. When he reached her, he stopped and simply stared for a few moments. The lynx stared back, her deep blue eyes hardened but her posture swaying with intimidation. The room was quiet around them as they stood still under the peripheral vision of the other pilots.

* * *

The cockpit panels and instruments that had been flickering in a vain attempt to regain function were now completely dead, although every couple of seconds the split power cord would still flare up with a shower of sparks. They sprang all over the small space - just large enough for a pilot to twist and move their arms comfortably - and singed flesh and cloth.

The chips and cracks in the canopy had spread and webbed outward, results of the cockpit's losing battle to retain the relatively high-pressure air inside. Outside the veined canopy, she noticed with a cloudy indifference that the asteroid her ship had been buried in had stopped spinning. While still very detached, her mind was sharp enough at this point to realize that in space, the asteroid would've had no gravity to stop its spinning; it must've been done by an outside influence.

Suddenly, a blocky, hodge-podge vessel emerged from the opposite side of the asteroid. About four times the size of the pilot's broken fighter, the ship dragged a pair of dangling, heavy-duty claws beneath its bulk, giving it the appearance of an ancient undersea creature probing for prey. A pair of smaller craft converged above the lumbering machine, more angled and sleeker than their larger counterpart, but no less upsetting to the half-conscious pilot.

The com unit continued to spit static as the clawed monstrosity neared the helpless wreck of a starfighter. One of the arms abruptly activated and twisted, reaching up and towards the remains before it suddenly froze in place. The static briefly cleared, and the pilot's slanted ears twitched as she barely made out the sound of two distinctly different voices as they were warped and bent by the malfunctioning com.

"…think the pilot's alive, cap."

"Nuh-uh; look's dead ta me," a second, deeper voice responded.

"You sure? I'm pretty sure I – there! See that? He moved again!" the first speaker said.

"Where?"

"I'm pretty sure his arm moved that time." The first voice seemed unsure of himself.

"You're seeing things buddy; I didn't see shit."

"It's not like it'd make a difference," a third voice chimed in, "Boss wants his fighter back, with or without the pilot. 'Without' is a whole lot easier."

"…good point," the first two voices said in unison after a short pause.

The com returned to solid static and the frozen claw jerked and continued on its path towards the cockpit. There wasn't a possibility that the massive piece of machinery which was opening up to grip the broken fighter was going to be gentle enough to allow the fragile canopy to stay intact.

Realizing this through her stupor, the bloodied and beaten pilot instinctively grabbed for the ejection handle.

* * *

The sound of a footfall on the sun bleached threshold of the door snapped Miyu back to the present, and she lashed out from the shadows.

Miyu's knife arced through the air, ready to catch Keelik square in the chest as he burst through the doorway. The metal of his pistol flashed in the sunlight, and the knife was intercepted by the wolf's reflexive gun arm.

Keelik grunted as his weapon clattered from his stricken limb to the wooden floor. He absorbed the blow though, pulling Miyu's arm in with his offhand and driving his elbow into her temple.

She stumbled backwards, stunned by the blow to the head. In the midst of a mental maelstrom, she registered the fact that her hand was empty.

Before she could react, Keelik pounced, knocking the lynx to the ground. He fell on top of her as she threw her arms up to ward him off. Instead, they caught his hands, stopping her own knife a palm's width from her face.

Crushed by his weight, Miyu could only struggle to fend off the blade's tip. It was all her eyes could focus on, vibrating centimeters from her as she poured every ounce of strength into her upper body. The attack had come too fast; she had had no chance to recover. Already her arms were beginning to burn. Already her grip was beginning to slip.

The floorboards creaked as Keelik shifted, moving more of his weight atop the weapon. Aided by gravity and his mass the knife inched closer.

Miyu grit her teeth as the edge brushed the fur on her cheek. The nerves there triggered as though the tip had broken skin, sending a burning chill through her system. She closed her eyes as her throat choked up. This wasn't how she wanted to go.

Then, suddenly, the strain subsided slightly. Miyu felt a drop of something wet fall onto on her cheek. Blood. The knife refused to budge, but it stopped moving downward.

Miyu's eyes opened, half expecting and desperately hoping to see some sort of spontaneous wound on her attacker. Maybe Fox had circled around?

Instead, all she saw was Keelik's sneer. Another drop of blood dripped onto her muzzle, falling from the gash in Keelik's arm from Miyu's initial strike.

"Miyu Lynx," he said. His facial features were faintly illuminated, though he largely remained in silhouette, eclipsed by the blinding sunlight pouring in the doorway behind him. The blond streak across his muzzle and his hair were washed out by the effect. His eyes, slightly sunken, were black, empty holes. "I thought it was you."

She remained quiet, staring up at him defiantly. It never left her mind that even while she gave everything she had to keep the knife off her, he was now toying with her.

"You don't recognize me?" he asked, pausing a moment to adjust his grip while keeping the pressure. His voice was only subtly tinged with effort. "Of course you do. I should...hope you recognize who used to pay you."

A low, quiet growl escaped Miyu's lips. She managed to push the blade incrementally away, only to have it sink back into the edge of her fur.

"Ah, not so fast," Keelik smirked with a strained chuckle. "You know, at first...at first I thought you died back in Meteos. I thought you bit it with the rest of those..." he paused, spitting the next word. "_Incompetent _freelancers. But then..._then,_ the salvage crew I sent after your ship goes missing."

Miyu listened without moving, struggling to keep eye contact. He had to keep talking. Her good leg, unhindered by a gunshot wound, had managed to slip free from Keelik's weight. If she could keep him talking for a few more moments...

In a flash, Keelik slammed his elbow into her temple again, shocking her nervous system. Unimpeded for a split second he twisted and reached back, sinking the knife into her free leg.

Miyu's eyes shot open and her shriek pierced the empty room, cutting off abruptly with a sharp inhale as the knife was pulled out. Her hands caught the weapon as it arced back, this time wrapping around Keelik's fingers as the edge of the blade came to a halt at her neck. She felt the cool metal at her throat, her breathing becoming shallow and sharp for fear of pushing her own flesh against the blade. Her own blood stained her fine neck fur.

"Please...," he said, his smile stabbing into her mind. "Don't interrupt me."

The new position of the knife prevented Keelik from using his weight on it, but Miyu gained no benefit. Her hands were wet with sweat, and greasy with blood, both hers and the wolf's. She kept adjusting her grip as she struggled to find purchase.

"And _then_, I see you on Corneria, running with Fox McCloud." His voice lowered a little. "You know, I heard that Star Fox was flying escort for those transports way back. I heard that _they_ were the ones who shot you down. And now you're taking a credit stub from them."

"Tell me Miyu, how much did it cost Fox to sate your desperation? When your failure couldn't find you work anywhere else, how much did you settle on for their pity?"

Miyu felt her strength ebbing as he spoke, his words bringing the memories of her first weeks with Fox and his team fresh to her mind. She swallowed, feeling the blade scrape up and down her throat. Falco's hostility. Slippy's nervousness. Fox's distrust. Was it because they pitied her? Were they just desperate for another body to fill a cockpit?

"And now you've deluded yourself into sacrificing yourself for them," he said, leaning forward. Miyu felt his weight shift as the silhouette of his face grew larger, totally eclipsing the doorway. The knife pressed into her skin, drawing a thin stream of blood from her neck. Keelik's eyes came into focus, resolving from the black spots to intense, lucid irises. "Do you honestly think he's coming back for you? Do you honestly believe he and any of his crew who may have escaped thanks to your little rescue attempt haven't already forgotten about you, trying to find a way off this island?"

A sense of dread overwhelmed her, bubbling up from where it had been pooling for the past several minutes. She flashed back to when she had been dropped off following Peppy's abduction. How she walked away from their shuttle and never looked back. She could still remember the sense of relief she felt leaving them behind. _"At least it's not me," _her thoughts echoed. _"Those bounties are a death sentence, but at least it's not me." _Fox had saved her life, and she walked away from them to save herself without even a shred of remorse. She never thanked him, much less repaid him, but she ran for her own sake nonetheless.

And what had she done for Fox and his team that made her worthy of rescue? Why would any of them come for her? They were the only ones in her freelancer's life who had even taken a remote interest in her well being, but in this situation, she couldn't imagine one amongst them who would dive back into the hurricane that Barrados had become solely for her.

"It was a good run, Miyu," Keelik said, drawing Miyu's attention back to the last thing she would ever see. His voice had lowered in volume, but gained a certain sharpness in its place. "But we'll find our lost charges. The starport will shut down with so much panic. Nobody's leaving this island. Yourself included."

Miyu finally relented mentally; her hands still strained with resistance, but it was only her instinct for survival that drove them. Her mind had already accepted the fact that her end was fast approaching.

"And _still_ you struggle. Listen," Keelik finished, tilting the knife to gain a better vector. He held his breath for a moment. "I don't hear anyone running down the alley. I don't hear any shoes on those stairs."

"That's because I took 'em off."

A pair of hands shot from behind Keelik's head, attached together by a silver chain. The metal whipped down over the wolf's head, slipping through the small space between Keelik's muzzle and Miyu. It hung limp for a split second before drawing taut as the orange hands withdrew, pulling the chain against Keelik's neck.

Keelik reacted immediately, clawing at the chain with both hands. An orange-furred leg came into view as the third party shifted itself to pull harder. Keelik reached behind him with one arm in an effort to loosen his attacker's grip. His breath was severely labored, his windpipe nearly cut off by the chain.

With a growl of effort the attacker yanked upward, forcing Keelik's chin into the air even as the wolf found purchase on the chain.

"Miyu!"

The shout snapped Miyu to action, and a surge of adrenaline shot through her. She flipped the knife around, gripping it with one blood-stained hand and pressing her other palm against the bottom. With a cry she pushed herself up, driving the tip of knife into the soft tissue under Keelik's jaw.

The blade sank nauseatingly deep. As Miyu's reserves left her, she fell back to the floor, her vice grip on the knife bringing it with her. It clattered to the ground in the sudden still of the room. The silhouetting effects of the light from the door hid the damage she caused to her lupine attacker, but the way he immediately fell limp said all that was necessary.

Keelik was lowered gently to the ground beside Miyu. With a little twisting, the new figure managed to get the handcuff chain free from the face-down wolf's neck. The figure stood up, looming over Miyu with the same eclipsing effect as the Black Star chief moments before. With a tinkling of the chain connecting his cuffs, the figure bent over again, offering a hand to the fallen lynx.

"Wh...why," she panted. Miyu took his hand, hauling herself into a sitting position. She looked up at the figure, blinking in the light. She was already starting to feel the affects of blood loss. "Why did you come ba-"

"Like I said," Fox smiled, kneeling down in front of her. "I'm not going anywhere." The vulpine looked down at the blood pooling under her legs, bleached by the sunlight streaming in behind him. One leg looked to have been merely grazed by a bullet, while the other was practically torn open. He flinched. "But um, it doesn't looking like you are, either. Hold on."

Fox looked around for a moment before reaching over to Keelik's body, grasping the back of the wolf's shirt. With a strong pull the fabric teared at the seams, leaving Fox with a ragged sheet of the lightweight material. Gripping one corner of it between his teeth, he tore the surprisingly resilient fabric further into strips. He worked fast, though if he were worried about Miyu's timeline or his own, the lynx couldn't tell.

"Can you move your leg at all?" he asked, grabbing Miyu's lower leg and lifting it slightly so he could slip a strip of fabric under it.

Miyu grimaced and strained, managing to put some effort into her wounded limb. "A little," she whispered. Her voice gained a little strength and a lot of edge as she felt Fox's hands, however. "Wait, what the hell are you-"

The vulpine ignored her. Fox got the strip of fabric up to her thigh and wrapped it around the knife wound, tightening it as much as he could after folding another piece of cloth and stuffing it over the source of the bleeding. The tinkling of his handcuff chain was the only sound in the room save for its occupants' heavy breathing. Despite being winded from his dash for freedom, however, Fox worked quickly and methodically, only slowed down by the inconvenience of his cuffs. It was clear that the material he was applying wouldn't stop the bleeding entirely, but it would at least put pressure on the wound.

Miyu screwed her eyes shut, biting her lip and trying desperately not to cry out in pain. Her eyes became wet from the burning heat scorching her nerves as Fox worked. It almost felt like the knife was still there.

"Okay, we've gotta get you out of here," he said, tying the fabric in a knot and drawing her skirt back over it. He tried to smile as he stood and walked behind her, bending down and lifting her arm over his shoulder. "You can yell at me for trying to push up your skirt after we get you back to Sophie and-"

"Freeze!"

They froze. Standing in the doorway at the bottom of the small staircase was the Black Star operative who had gone after Fox when he ran. He was panting heavily, his pistol raised before him in both hands and trained on the pair in the small abode. Whether due to the lack of light in the house or his distracted eyes, he never seemed to notice Keelik's body lying a meter or so away from them.

Fox swallowed. He slowly lowered Miyu back the small distance to the floor, lifting his chained hands up in a show of submission. His eyes flicked to Keelik's discarded handgun, lying near the doorway, tantalizingly out of reach.

Miyu stayed upright, bracing an arm behind her. With her body blocking the hand's actions from the operative's view, she gripped the handle of the recently bloodied knife, glancing at Fox. She knew she wasn't valuable at all to Keelik's henchmen; it was Fox they wanted alive. As soon as the operative figured it out, she knew she was forfeit.

The handle was slippery to the touch. Miyu had never thrown a knife before, but with the imagined clock rapidly winding down, she tensed her muscles, ready to bet her life on it.

A sudden pounding from above and a wild cry brought her eyes back towards the doorway, just in time to catch the shocked expression on the Black Star operative's face as he looked at the balconies above him.

A blue and olive drab blur streaked into him knee first like a meteor, toppling him to the ground out of Fox and Miyu's line of sight.

Without hesitation, Fox dashed to the doorway, scooping up Keelik's pistol in one fluid motion. Just as he was taking aim though, the sounds of struggling from outside came to an abrupt halt with a solid, meaty _thud. _Fox's weapon lowered, a smile spreading across his face as another figure approached the doorway.

"Hope I'm not late," Falco said between breaths, ascending the stairs to the abode. He was walking with a slight limp gained from his leap, though nothing that suggested injury. He stopped at the top, glimpsing Miyu sitting inside. "So which one of you screamed a few minutes ago? Heard it halfway across the island." The avian cast a sidelong glance at Fox. "I'm gonna guess you."

He stopped when he saw Fox's expression drift into a serious line. Upon closer inspection of the room, Falco dropped his jolly demeanor, seeing the pool of blood lying beneath the wounded lynx. His smile faded, and he glanced at Fox again, eyebrows raised a little.

"Is she-"

"I'm fine," Miyu growled, grasping her upper leg. She had dropped the knife next to her upon realizing the interloper was Falco, and was gingerly probing her wound, flinching every time her fingertips made contact. The lines etched on her face spoke only of a constant, driving pain.

"We've got to get back to the Coral Sun_,_" Fox said, looking at Falco. "Once we free Hartford and them we can start looking for a way off this island."

"Way ahead of ya, Foxie," Falco replied, shaking his head. "Hartford and Thorne are waiting for us at the starport; Thorne's got a military transport there that can't be locked down by starport control. Rhena's with 'em."

Fox nodded, about to return to Miyu to help her up before he stopped, looking back at Falco.

"Wait; what about Bishop?"

Falco breathed out. "Dead," he said, shaking his head. "One of those Black Star goons shot him during the firefight."

"So the deal..."

"We're still good," Falco replied, grabbing the chain connecting Fox's handcuffs. With a carefully placed round from his pistol, the chain snapped, freeing the vulpine's hands. "Thorne's going to pick up for Bishop and honor the deal we would've made."

"Got it," Fox nodded, crossing off the necessary checkboxes in his mind. With their exit strategy in place and the entire reason they came to Barrados in the first place still intact, he was able to run down the other strings pulling his mind in so many directions.

A barely audible whimper escaped Miyu's lips in that moment of silence, despite her best efforts to suppress it. The pain was starting to mount, and while her bullet graze had completely left her nervous system's radar, the gash from Keelik's stabbing was burning brighter than a star. Her face was twisted in agony by her ego, desperately trying not to express the waves of fire assaulting her brain in front of the two mercenaries.

Without a word Fox moved towards her, bending down on one knee next to her and grabbing her arm. Draping it around his neck, he repositioned his feet, ready to support her weight as he stood.

"Falco," he said, beckoning his friend over. As the avian stuff his pistol into his waistband, Fox turned towards Miyu, gauging the expression on her face. "You okay to stand?"

Miyu nodded, slowly at first, but speeding up as her breathing became heavier. It was going to hurt her even more, she had no doubt, but there was no alternative. She had survived Keelik; there was no way she was going to let herself be left behind now.

And yet, even as Falco knelt down opposite Fox and took her other arm around his neck, Miyu felt the briefest chill of pleasure in the inferno of pain. Something deep down told her that even if she were utterly unable to move, the two mercenaries helping her to her feet wouldn't have left the lynx on her own. It told the lynx that the same bond that drove Falco to literally leap buildings to track down Fox was beginning to form between the team and her. Sure, it might be a tentative link at best; a connection in its infancy, but it was one that was building where none had ever existed before.

She looked over at Fox, feeling his arm tighten around her. His body centered itself over his crouched feet, ready to stretch upward. He caught her eye and offered a lopsided smirk.

"Ready?"

"Yeah," she nodded again, breathing out once more and bracing for the pain.

And it came like a tidal wave.

A prolonged cry escaped her mouth as she rose before she could bite her lip, braced by the mercenaries on both sides. Her feet were drawn under her by the motion, leaving streaks of red on the wooden floorboards as they slipped through the deep red pools left by her wounds. Miyu could feel the sickening wetness between her toes, a sensation the presence of which she struggled to remember was in fact a good sign amidst the onslaught of pain.

Finally though she was upright. Her left leg found its way to solid footing, allowing her to take a small portion of her own weight. She gingerly tested her right leg, but it quickly faltered under the slightest pressure. For a brief moment she was falling before her arms drew tight around the mercenaries' necks.

"So a speedy getaway's out then?" Falco quipped, easily shouldering his half of Miyu's weight.

Fox glanced over at the avian, over the lynx's bowed head. He readjusted Miyu's grip over his shoulders.

"Not quite."

* * *

"It's been fifteen minutes," Lieutenant Thorne said, reaching the bottom of the transport's gangway.

The elongated, angled body of the military shuttle sat alone in the private docking bay, almost stretching the entire diameter of the circular, open air structure. Colored a deep, forest green, its hull bore the emblems of both the Cornerian planetary insignia and the Cornerian Seventh Fleet. From afar, the transport looked in pristine condition, its powerful engines and turret domes projecting a presence not often found in personnel carriers. However, when viewed up close, its paint bore the scars and burns gathered from a lifetime of operation and constant trans-atmospheric flight.

The hare's boots crunched gravel and dirt as she came to a stop a few steps from the dull metal of the shuttle's ramp. The sounds of frantic crowds seeped in from the surrounding island, evidence of the escalating panic sparked by Miyu's rescue attempt.

Rhena stood nearby with her arms crossed, starring at the personnel tunnel leading into the hanger. A small cut had appeared midway up her muzzle, gained from her brawl with Aush earlier. She glanced at the Lieutenant for a moment, letting the time hang in the air before resuming her watch of the tunnel.

"Besides my pilot here, I have a few utility drivers defecting with me," Thorne offered. "If you're worried about having enough pilots to get your ships out of _Threshold, _they're at your disposal. But we can't wait here any longer. We're the only transport on the ground that can leave and my guards at the tunnel entrance are reporting civvies trying to push through."

When Rhena didn't respond, Thorne took another step towards the wolf.

"Look, I'm sure they were great soldiers, but between my men and Wolf O'Donnell we've got more than enough to replace a few-"

Thorne stopped cold under Rhena's withering glare. The fire-haired wolf's eyes bored into the Cornerian Lieutenant's like twin stars, burning with a cold, calculating anger at her words.

A gunshot caught both their attention, however, and they turned towards the entrance tunnel where it emanated from. Thorne snatched her com set from her belt and raised it to her mouth.

"Report," she barked as Rhena reached for her pistol, tucked behind her back.

"Someone shot a weapon into the air," a voice crackled back over the device. The screams of a stampeding crowd were clear in the background of the transmission. "Sounded like a handgun, something low calibur."

"Hostile?" Thorne asked, reaching for her own weapon with her free hand.

"Stand by," the voice replied, followed by a short silence. Rhena was drifting towards the tunnel entrance by the time the guard came back. "Negative on hostile. It's the mercs. Ms. Monroe has a positive ID on all three of them."

Both women visibly eased at the report. As they watched, a small group of figures appeared in the docking bay's entrance tunnel, silhouetted until they emerged into the bright light of Barrados' noon sun.

Katt and Fox led the group, the latter holding a pistol in his hands. The weapon's silencer had been removed, evidence of the vulpine's somewhat crude manner of dispersing the crowd that blocked him and his crew. The feline was in frantic conversation with him, though Fox replied only in short, concise answers. His face looked like he was still expecting a Black Star operative to be waiting around the corner.

Behind them came Falco, breathing heavily and moving with determination. On his back was Miyu, arms wrapped tightly around the avian's neck. Her face was empty of expression or feeling, looking as if she were about to fall asleep. Both of her legs, poking forward through Falco's arms, were discolored a dark red, though one leg was far worse than her other.

Bringing up the rear were a pair of Cornerian marines, lacking armor but carrying their standard issue rifles. They cast glances behind them every few steps, as if checking on the distance of pursuers.

"That crowd's probably not far behind them," Thorne muttered, leaving Rhena and dashing back up the ramp to the shuttle. She lifted her com unit again, this time speaking to the transport's pilot. "They're back. Get those skids up, and try not to catch any civilians who might rush in here in the blow back."

* * *

"_Cornerian transport, this is Barrados control. Return to your berth immediately. All transport operations are grounded until-"_

"_Negative control. This is Lieutenant Thorne of the Cornerian Seventh Fleet; this transport is operating under Cornerian Naval jurisdiction."_

"_Transport, return to ground immediately or planetary fighters will be scrambled to escort you down. By order of Aquas planetary code, all transports are to be grounded until a culprit is found for the murders of-"_

"_I will remind you, control, that any action interfering with this transport's flight plan will be viewed as hostile to Cornerian military interests. I will also remind you that this transport is armed and armored, and that the CNS _Hauberk _is currently orbiting Aquas in low orbit."_

"_...What is your destination, transport?"_

"Threshold _Station. I'd appreciate a list of open docking bays."_

"_...Acknowledged."_

* * *

Threshold Station was abuzz with news of the shootings on Barrados; every data screen and public broadcast viewer aboard the installation was playing the news feeds. There was still plenty of uncertainty regarding the actual series of events the followed the initial gunshots, with subsequent reports of small arms fire numbering in the dozens. Small groups of vacationers gathered around the news kiosks in the concourse, watching the incoming signals from airborne news reporters down on the surface. Images of giant, milling crowds surrounding Barrados' starport flooded the feeds, masses of tiny dots in a near state of panic.

Fox only caught a glimpse of the scene as he led his crew from one private hanger to the adjacent, disembarking from the Cornerian transport and heading towards their own ships. Katt followed him, jogging to catch up with the vulpine, while Rhena and Falco brought up the rear, supporting Miyu between them. The lynx had come around enough, with some help from a Cornerian medic, to hop a bit of her own volition. They all moved at a hurried pace, wanting to spend as little time as possible aboard the station.

"Wait, Fox, hold up!" Katt panted, pulling even with him. She was still wearing her styled sandals, hindering her movement. "Where's Hartford going? And where's that Crendon fella?"

"Hartford's going to the _Hauberk _with Lieutenant Thorne," Fox replied, his careful eyes scanning those they passed for any ill intent. Since Falco dropped in on him and Miyu, Fox hadn't seen any Black Star operatives, but he couldn't shake the idea that more of them were lurking somewhere nearby. "He'll guide them to the rendezvous point with Wolf's frigate."

They passed through the doorway into their private hanger, greeted by the familiar sight of their shuttles and CDF fighters. Out of the corner of his eye, Fox caught one of Wolf's marines flat against the wall, a pistol drawn and ready to get the drop if necessary. The two men nodded at each other as the rest of Fox's crew filtered in.

"And Crendon-" Fox began to answer Katt's second question before he was interrupted by a new voice.

"Where's the Gamma?" another of Wolf's marines spoke up from the open doorway of Katt's shuttle. An automatic rifle was held loosely in his hands.

"He's..." Fox hesitated before answering, noticing a sudden onset of tension in the pair of soldiers. With a sudden rush of intuition, he realized the implications of what he was about to say. "...dead."

"Dead?" the marine in the shuttle repeated incredulously. He backed up a step, glancing at what Fox presumed to be another of Wolf's soldiers hidden from view within the shuttle. As he did, the insignia of a Delta rank could be clearly seen on his shoulder. The marine in command turned back to Fox. "And Aush?"

"Bastard turned on us," Falco said as he and Rhena came to a stop in the hanger, letting Miyu rest on her own leg for a moment. "He's gone, too."

Almost simultaneous with the doorman locking the hanger door behind them came the ominous sound of weapons priming. The Delta's rifle was suddenly at his shoulder as he sidestepped, hiding half his body behind the shuttle's doorway. Another similarly armed soldier materialized next to him, decked out in full combat armor with a medic's patch on his arm. Behind the mercenaries, the marine by the door had his pistol raised in both hands.

In response Falco and Rhena both instinctively pulled their pistols, leaving Miyu to the mercy of Threshold's artificial gravity. The lynx caught herself just before falling flat on the deck plating below, bracing her weight on her elbow and arm. Katt immediately stood upright, hands reaching for the overhead lights of the docking bay.

"The hell is this?" Fox shouted, hand resting on the pistol strapped to the small of his back. He would have sought cover, but from where he stood out in the open, it would have been a fruitless effort.

"Hold your fire," the Delta commanded his men, his voice echoing within the high ceiling of the room. The sights of his weapon never left Fox's face, only a stone's throw away. "Tell me what happened down there, McCloud."

Fox met the Delta's gaze evenly. He tried to pick his words carefully, knowing full well that at the moment, there was nothing he could say to convince Wolf's marines that the mercenaries themselves didn't kill off Crendon and Aush. The mistrust was certainly there with Wolf's forces, and had been since the Star Fox team arrived on the _Lone Wolf. _Crendon had been the team's only real ally within the lower ranks of Wolf's battalion, and now his death had itself sparked further animosity.

"Aush betrayed us and turned us over to the Black Star smuggling syndicate," the vulpine said slowly but with confidence. "They were planning on turning us and the Cornerian contacts over to Bauker."

"How did the Gamma die?"

"He...wasn't considered worthwhile," Fox replied. "Aush shot him right after the Black Star thugs ambushed us."

"I don't buy it, Delt," the doorman said loudly, pistol still trained on Falco and Rhena. "Gamma wouldn't get caught off guard like that."

The Delta tightened his grip on his weapon and shifted a little further out of view behind the shuttle's hull. His eyes narrowed.

"I agree."

The room began to simmer, the tension tightening to an almost claustrophobic level. Fox felt his gun hand begin to sweat as his eyes darted back and forth between the Delta and the marine next to him. As the seconds ticked on, scenarios began running through his head, each and every one of them resulting in his own likely death in the first moments of the firefight. His team was outgunned and caught in the wide open. Between the pair of marines in the shuttle and the third soldier behind them at the hanger door, the word 'crossfire' was burning itself straight into his mind.

"_If we pin down the guys in the shuttle we could probably get to the CDF fighters; that's at least some cover. Falco and Rhena will have to take down the door guy pretty quickly though..."_

He didn't even know where the fourth guard was.

"He said to tell you 'Leon's misunderstood'," Fox spat out, the last moments of Crendon's life suddenly replaying through his mind. "It was the last thing he said."

Almost immediately the Delta lowered his weapon. He stared at Fox for another few moments, as if trying to determine if he misheard the vulpine, before proceeding out of the shuttle and down its ramp. At the same time, the other marines lowered their weapons, taking on less threatening stances. Taking the invitation, Falco and Rhena both lowered their pistols as well.

The Delta's boots hit the deck. He proceeded to Fox, stopping in front of the mercenary captain. His eyes burned with curious skepticism as they peered into Fox's, searching for some sort of indication of falsehood. His military-grade hardware was still sitting heavy in his hands, lowered but certainly not forgotten by either of them.

Finally, the Delta took a hand off his weapon and extended it to the vulpine. Fox, for his part, slowly released his hold on his pistol and took the offered hand, shaking it firmly.

"He died as you said then," the Delta said, acknowledging the coded distress phrase. "What's the status of the mission?"

"Success," Fox said, finally visibly relaxing. He had not been expecting a standoff in what he took to be the only safe place left near Aquas. "Captain Hartford is going to guide the Cornerian cruiser to the meet up point."

"Alright then; let's not be late." The Delta lifted a finger in the air and whirled his hand in a small circle, whistling a sharp signal. Immediately the doorman began jogging towards the shuttles, where the armored marine was already waiting.

A commotion by the far CDF fighter caught Fox's attention. Emerging from beneath the shadow cast by the fuselage of the craft was the fourth and final of Wolf's marines. He quickly and methodically disassembled a floor brace and slung a long barreled sniper rifle over his shoulder as he stood and began making his way to the shuttles.

A cool breeze washed down Fox's spine. All the luck and planning in the world wouldn't have saved him from that sniper's bullet. He wouldn't have even seen it coming.

Fox said a few silent words of thanks to Gamma Crendon for his foresight and did his best to wash the whole incident from his mind as he jogged towards his borrowed CDF fighter.

* * *

The yellow vapors of Sector Y swirled and danced enticingly close by, beckoning the Cornerian cruiser and its escorts into its folds.

The bulky warship had powered down its engines close to an hour ago, drifting to coordinates just outside the the Sector's gases before bringing itself to a halt. It's dull gray and deep green colors faded to a uniform darkness against the yellow hues of the cloud; it's angular lines and smooth curves lost their definition. The solid hull of the ship was in no danger of loosing its weight and presence, but the rest of it had turned a little hazy, as though seen through fog.

At least that's what it felt like to Miyu as she watched the massive cruiser through the front viewport of Katt's light freighter. The lynx was propped up on the floor against the back bulkhead, where she could feel the reverberations of the small craft's idling engines. Past Katt's head and the back of her pilot's chair, Miyu saw Fox and Rhena's CDF Fighters go soaring past, flying patrol while the group waited for Wolf's frigate to make contact. They soon disappeared into the mist of the clouds, only the glowing particle trails of the snubfighters' engines visible in the all consuming yellow. Somewhere nearby, the team's assault shuttle drifted with Falco at the helm.

The fog outside reflected the fogging nerves within the lynx. The sharp, knifing pain in her leg had faded to a dull, persistent throb, aided by some additional painkillers administered by the Delta's designated medic. The man was standing a few steps away, still dressed in his combat armor and discussing some trivial matter or another with the Delta himself, but Miyu had tuned them out.

She looked down at her wounds. The bullet graze on her left leg hardly seemed like a scratch in comparison, and the dressing on her right took all of her attention. A Cornerian medic had applied a legitimate bandage to the site as soon as they had left Barrados' starport, though he had made mention of the importance of Fox's impromptu wrap. Strapped atop the sterile white bandage was a pressurized pack full of vital fluids, slowly dripping into her bloodstream via a small, clear tube. She still could only barely move her toes, though it was far, far better than nothing. At least that's what both the Cornerian and the Delta's medics had said. Miyu was having trouble counting her blessings while the image of Rhena's knife pushing against her throat, greasy with her own blood, still danced before her.

At the same time, the feeling of her arms around Fox and Falco as they lifted her up remained with her. As did the sight of Fox's back as he ran in front of her and Falco, pistol at the read, the lynx barely conscious on the avian's back as they dashed through the street of Barrados.

Fox disappearing into a crowd before firing a shot into the air and yelling at the top of his lungs, parting the mob and allowing Falco and her through.

Fox kneeling wordlessly next to her as the Cornerian medic worked on her leg on the shuttle ride up to _Threshold. _

Given her state at the time, she couldn't know for sure if she had just imagined the images, but they seemed so lifelike to her. Like waking up after a particularly vivid dream, she was positive they were real.

"How's she holding up?"

Fox's voice was slightly sterilized by the com system, but it caused Miyu's ears to prick up. She couldn't see it on Katt's HUD, but his portrait was bordered in gold, indicating a private channel.

"She's doing fine, Foxie, don't you worry," Katt replied with a smile, casting a glance over her shoulder at Miyu. The Delta's medic took the opportunity to walk over to the lynx, kneeling next to her and pulling a diagnostic instrument from his belt. "The medic's checking over her again. She's been in and out since we left _Threshold, _but-"

"My man's the best in Lord O'Donnell's corps, McCloud." The Delta approached Katt's chair, standing behind it and crossing his arms as he spoke up. "You've got nothing to be concerned about."

"Yeah, sorry; nothing against your medic, Delta." Fox replied. He spoke up a little, smirking just as much. "Nothing against you back there."

The medic in question lifted a hand in acknowledgment without turning away from his instrument, strapping a small, wired pad to Miyu's wrist.

"I'm just gonna wait until Sophie takes a look at 'er before I settle down," Fox finished. He sighed. "I just never lost someone on a mission, you know? And that was way closer than I've ever been to breaking that streak."

Katt smiled, her eyes wide and playful, suggesting that she knew something that Fox himself might not have realized about his level of concern. "Well, she's alive thanks to you, ya big hero; let the professionals take it from here."

Fox cocked his head to the side a little, catching Katt's look but unable to decipher it. Shrugging it off, he glanced out his cockpit canopy for a moment before returning his eyes to Katt.

"Yeah, well, it's the least I could do; none of us would have gotten off that island without her-"

Before he could finish, a new voice broke through over the general com system.

"Fox, we've got a pair of contacts coming through the cloud," Hartford's disembodied voice said. Coming from somewhere on the _Hauberk_'s bridge, there was no portrait to go with it. "We're transmitting the code phrase. Stand by."

"Got it," Fox responded, his portrait losing its gold outline. The compassion and softness in his facial features evaporated, replaced by a deliberate, serious demeanor. He reached across his body, flipping some switches on the dashboard. "Give us a vector and we'll fly picket. Shields up, Rhena." A single _click _came from the wolf's fighter.

* * *

He wore the uniform of a decorated Venomian officer, and while those he had passed in the corridors of the _Endeavor_ took a momentary interest in his rank, they payed little attention to his face. There was little remarkable about him to notice; just another officer come to pledge his allegiance to Bauker's navy.

Since Warlord Bauker officially declared hostilities against Corneria earlier that day, those upper echelons of Venom's former military who hadn't already joined with the various Warlords had been coming forward in droves. Independent warship captains, fighter wings gone pirate, and any number of other cast offs from Andross' former glory following the Lylat War sent envoys or messages confirming their loyalty. Aboard Bauker's flagship, they had become akin to tourists, sweeping through a beach town just as the storm season was retiring.

Had anyone realized who the man actually was, they may have treated his presence with a bit more gravity.

The man stood in a secured observation room deep in the bowels of the _Endeavor_. It was small, dark and almost entirely without furnishings, save for a small bank of computers in the corner, a plain metal chair hooked up with a number of medical instruments, and a pair of spot lights. The only door was closed, isolating those within from the busy corridors of the rest of the ship. The eternal, sterile smell of science and sanitizer permeated the room, seeping into its occupants' nostrils.

Both spotlights were on and directed at a being sitting in the metal chair: one shining at him head on, the other illuminating him from the ceiling above. The hare looked old and haggard, aged well beyond his years by months of interrogating and medical torture. His closed eyes were sunken and surrounded by darkened skin. His face was sullen and wrinkled with pain. His breathing was long but shallow, reflecting a being broken and bleeding, both physically and mentally.

Warlord Bauker stood by the computer bank in the corner, alternating his attention between the man in the Venomian uniform, and casually observing the operator manning the workstation. Various signals and vital signs were displayed on the many monitors, gathered from the various instruments attached to the hare sitting under the spotlights. The operator typed in a series of commands, bringing up another screen on one of the monitors. A number on the monitor began climbing and flashing.

With the slow, curious gait of a biologist observing an animal in a zoo, the feline warlord made his way over to the man in the Venomian uniform, who was standing behind the horizontal spotlight.

The intensity of the spotlight combined with the otherwise blackened room rendered the man standing outside its cone of illumination a silhouette. Bauker had seen the man before, and knew his face well, but whether by accident or intention the man always seemed to find shadows to hide in.

Bauker flashed back to the various briefings and conferences he had had with his allies and subordinates. In each of them, the man attended remotely and in privacy, his com portrait always shrouded in darkness. Bauker was sure the name the man went by was a pseudonym of some sort. Normally, the sort of identity evasion the man displayed would've utterly discounted him as a reliable partner of any sort, but his enormous monetary contributions, as well as his deep insight into Venom's more clandestine projects and operations, made him invaluable.

If the man wanted to keep a level of privacy in exchange for his assets, Bauker reasoned, it was his right to do so.

"Mr. Gallant, he's coming around."

The man turned his head towards Bauker, acknowledging the warlord with a genial nod before returning his attention to the subject of the spotlight directly next to his head.

"How goes your marshaling, Joseph?" the man asked, his voice pleasant and conversational. "I must have seen patches from every one of Venom's stray squadrons and battle groups on my way down here."

"You've only seen the rabble, I'm afraid," Bauker answered him, coming a stop beside the silhouetted man. The cougar glanced at the subject in the chair. "My major players were deployed a week ago. Gage's fleet in the north, Norwood in the south, Raymund in the east-"

"And Corneria in the west. Quite a castle on the hill you've got for yourself, my friend."

"Nothing worth having is ever an easy fight, Mr. Gallant. But the Cornerians are unsuspecting. And without their leadership, the planetary militias will crumble."

"You're sure about that?"

"I am," Bauker replied, raising an eyebrow at Mr. Gallant's skepticism and crossing his arms. "Within a week, Corneria will stand alone once again, their fleets scattered. Within a month we'll have united all of Lylat's free citizens against them." He lifted a hand, counting off Lylat's inhabited planets on his fingers. "Macbeth, Fortuna, Zoness, Aquas, Katina..." His words trailed off as he considered the last world he named. "...Perhaps not Katina."

It was hard to make out facial features on the silhouetted man; it was difficult even to make out his species. But Bauker could've sworn he saw Mr. Gallant smile when the cougar mentioned the last planet.

"Katina was always a thorn," the man agreed. "Even during the Lylat War, they held out with Corneria when nobody else would. They won't be taken easily."

"Sir," the computer operator said after a slight pause. The figure on his console had begun to blink in a red font. "He's conscious."

Bauker glanced over at the hare under the spotlight's blinding illumination, just in time to catch his eyelids flicking open. The subject's eyes were bloodshot with fatigue, but they burned with intensity, staring at nothing and everything at once. His breathing became more intense.

"Mr. Gallant, he's ready for questioning." As the man stepped towards the seated hare, Bauker continued, drifting forward in the man's wake with his arms still crossed. "As you asked we haven't spoken to him since he broke this morning."

"Good," Mr. Gallant replied, maintaining his genial tone as he came into the light. He stepped in front of the chair the hare was seated in, positioning himself in front of the horizontal spotlight, while standing just outside the ceiling spotlight's circle of light. The result was an eclipsing silhouette from the hare's point of view as he stood before the prisoner. "If Andross' research notes on Project Lithium are to be trusted, you may not even have to worry about taking Corneria."

"I hope you're right," Bauker replied after a short pause of considering what the man said, sounding a little hesitant to challenge Mr. Gallant. "We've spent a lot of resources on this hare."

The hare slowly but smoothly lifted his head at the shadow in front of him, his mouth silent and his eyes stoic, but his mind clouded with unspoken questions. His increased breathing reverberated through his body, and his muscles seemed to expand and contract with every breath. For from lending him any any visual sense of strength, however, the peculiar motion only spoke of the torture and exhaustion his body had endured.

"Now, Peppy Hare," the man said, staring down at the seated subject. "Tell me about what lies beyond the Lithium gate." He bent down a little, bringing his face closer to Peppy's.

"What lies beneath Cerinia's surface?"

* * *

"It's good to see you again, Fox McCloud," Beta Rhade's portrait said as the pair of Wolfen fighters emerged from the fog of Sector Y. "I only wish I had better news for you."

Fox gently guided his joystick to the side, bringing his CDF fighter on a wide, sweeping loop around Wolf O'Donnell's snubfighters, now marked friendly on his HUD. He smiled at the sight of the lupine pilot, evidently fully recovered from the incident on the _Broadsword_'s wreck. However, the Beta's words caused him to furrow his brow a little. The fact that they were delivered with an underlying sense of urgency didn't help at all, either.

"You too, Rhade," Fox replied, glancing out his cockpit canopy as the Wolfens floated by. "But what happened? Don't tell me Wolf canceled our contract."

Rhade smirked, a rare showing of humorous emotion. "Don't worry mercenary, your contract remains. As soon as a deal is made with the your Cornerian captain, you'll get your payment."

"Glad to hear it," Fox said. He chopped back the throttle, bringing his fighter up on Rhade's wing, even with the Beta's cockpit. "Then what's going on? And where's the _Osgard_?"

"The _Osgard_'s currently engaged with your _Great Fox _and a flight of our fighters against a Venomian combat patrol at one of Siona's bases nearby." Rhade reported solemnly. He glanced at his dashboard, checking an information readout. "Ideally, we'll wrap up formal negotiations with the..._Hauberk _quickly and move to assist."

"Venomian?" Fox questioned, tilting his head a little. "Which warlord?"

"You misunderstand, McCloud," Rhade answered. "Bauker's Alliance has declared war on Corneria."

"Wha-"

"He's right, Mr. McCloud," Lieutenant Thorne's voice interjected. A new portrait unfolded on Fox's HUD depicting the Cornerian officer, the camera zoomed and focused on her head and shoulders. The _Hauberk_'s bridge was arrayed behind her. It was an unspoken statement that she had been monitoring the pilots' conversation. "We've been monitoring the Cornerian coded channels. Admiral Gage is openly attacking Cornerian military assets around Aquas and Zoness; there have been a half dozen distress beacons lit in the last hour."

"Looks like we got out just in time," Fox said, eyes wide at the sudden news. He bit back some words as to why the Cornerian officer had neglected to tell him and his team sooner.

"Indeed," Thorne replied, shifting her attention to Rhade. "Mr. Rhade. I take it you're Wolf O'Donnell's emissary in place of the frigate he promised?"

"Correct," Rhade nodded.

"I'm Lieutenant Thorne, acting commander of the _CNS Hauberk_," Thorne said formally. "Given the circumstances, I'd be willing to put off our negotiations until our potential employer is out of the fire, so to speak. We've got a skeleton crew, but I'm sure a cruiser would give Bauker's ships something else to think about."

"Very well," Rhade replied. "I'm uploading coordinates now. McCloud, if you and your wingman would be so kind as to form up on me and mine."

With a silent snap and a brilliant flash, the _Hauberk_'s massive thrusters ignited, settling to a cold, even burn as the warship began to maneuver. It centered its trajectory on the quartet of snubfighters, moving in slow motion as though through water. Soon the cruiser was consumed by the vapors of Sector Y, disappearing into the abyss of yellow. Like the soldiers of long ago, she was riding off to war once more.

"Here we go again, eh?" Falco quipped, his gold bordered portrait on Fox's HUD depicting a being trying to keep his casual lightheartedness afloat in a sea of uncertainty. However, his listless eyes gave him away. "I'm not gonna lie, buddy," he said, scratching his forehead. "I'm starting to miss not having so much work."

"Yeah," Fox answered, exhaling the tension and pressure of the mission on Barrados. There was only so much room where the vulpine could store his stress, and something told him he was going to need the extra space soon enough.

"You think Lylat's gonna need us like it did back...you know."

"I don't know, Falco," Fox replied, shaking his head. "I don't know."

"But I really hope not."

* * *

**A/N:**

Got a few things to say, but first let's get to the reviews.

**Jack Falconer**: Thanks for all of the reviews Jack! There's a bit too much there for me to comment on every point, but I'll bring up a few things you mentioned. First, in regards to Wolf's odd behavior in comparison to the Star Fox Assault Wolf, my intention was to use the Star Fox 64 version of him. He's a bit more reserved and less brash in 64, and maybe I'm reading too far into the characterization, but he seemed more charismatic, too. That's where I got the idea that other pilots and soldier might turn to him as Venom crumbled at the end of the game. Second, I really liked your analysis of each of the team's "visions" after the Sector Y jump. I won't say what I was intending for each of them, but your descriptions are remarkable.

Third...yes, zombies. I introduced them into the story with two goals: add something odd and a little eerie into the narrative, and make them scientifically logical (or at least close to it). I don't like the supernatural "don't worry about logic, it's magic" feel a lot of adventure stories have, but I do enjoy the novelty of a lot of their set pieces and characters. So to resolve the two, I added zombie-like creatures that have a reason to exist and do so logically (or again, close to it). And finally, I really appreciated your analysis of each of the characters and where they might end up at the end of this.

**LilGstryker**: Thanks for the kind words! And I'm glad to hear you're enjoying Miyu's character.

**AndrossKenobi**: Thanks for the review AK! We'll have to see how your prediction turns out :)

**chaos Leader**: No worries cL; considering my update schedule, I could never blame anyone for missing a chapter. And while I love reading your reviews, please don't feel like you HAVE to leave one every time. But it's funny you mention Skyrim. I did play through the game (excellent game, by the way), and while your mention was the first time I drew that comparison, I can see what you're saying. It comes down to the old cliche of bad guys wanting to be bad guys because...they're bad guys. That doesn't make for interesting storytelling. Nobody views themselves as "bad"; everybody's the hero of their own stories, so I wanted to give the "bad guys" some actual, human motivations. That's what I liked a lot about the Skyrim story. You could totally see the motivations behind both sides, and while you might agree with one side more than the other, you could still sympathize with the "enemy." Hopefully something approaching that comes through in my writing *fingers crossed*

**RedBay**: Thanks for the reviews RedBay! Addressing a few points you brought up...Katt. I purposely designed her to be overly dense here because too often, I see characters in stories acting way out of line with their established characterizations, and its frankly no fun. Katt has no military background, isn't fond of weapons, and isn't all that knowledgeable about society's underbelly; she'd have no idea what to do against a smuggling organization. And besides, character flaws make characters more grounded and less super-soldiery. Anyway, that was the goal; whether I pulled it off is another matter entirely. Miyu getting under the taxis without being noticed however, is pretty much dumb luck. I try not to depend on that too much as it begins to remove any sense of tension, but here I kinda wrote myself into a corner. My mistake.

**The Frustrated**: Thanks TF! I'm glad to hear that roller coaster feeling manifested for you; one of things I've been working on improving is my pacing in these chapters. As for Katt, refer to my respond to RedBay's review above.

**Guest**: Thanks nameless person! Glad to hear you're enjoying the story. I made most of the characters mammalian because that's how most of the characters are in the Star Fox games. True, there are exceptions (Slippy, Leon, Falco), but mammals also tend to be easier to relate to, given that most pets and "cute" animals are mammalian. But now we're getting into the psychological components of anthropomorphizing animals, which is a WHOLE 'nother discussion entirely :P Anyway, thanks again for the review!

Alright, this concludes part 2 (of 3) of the story. However, unlike last time, I'm positive that I'm going to finish this story. It might take me another few years (I really, really hope it doesn't though), but it WILL get finished. I'd say we're looking at the story topping out at 50-60 chapters total, and I've already got a rough outline in place as to where I want it to go.

I'd like to reiterate here how sorry I am that these updates tend to be a month or two apart. A lot of things have happened since I began writing this story, and it seems like every single one of them has steadily taken more and more away from my pool of free time. It's a lousy excuse, I know. But hopefully you've gotten some enjoyment out of the story so far, and continue to enjoy the future chapters. If not, please let me know why so I can work to improve my writing. If you've noticed any difference in the quality at all from Chapter 1 to Chapter 39, it's because of reviewers spotting my issues and telling me how to correct them. I owe you guys everything for improving my writing. Thank you.

-Redd


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